sunshine party

You are my sunshine.

My only sunshine.

You make me happy when skies are grey.

You never know dear, how much I love you.

Please don't take my sunshine away.

For Reese's 2nd birthday party we really wanted her to feel loved and special - even if she didn't really know what was going on (but she totally did!) So we filled the party with all of her favorite things! The "theme" was a SUNSHINE party (copied from my dear friend Katie- but not nearly as cute as hers) Reese truly lights up our lives and is such a ray of smiling sunshine and excitement no matter what we're doing, so this theme just fit her perfectly. It would have been a little more fun if it would have actually been sunshiny outside - but of course we had the most random 50 degree freezing and cloudy day. oh well. (God taught me a great lesson through that actually! story for another time...) We had the party at the park {which was awesome bc then I didn't have to clean my house before or after!!} Reeser absolutely loves to play outside at the park and we talked up her party a lot the days before and she was so so so excited to get there to play with her friends and eat cupcakes. Here's her sweet face when she walked up to the pavilion all decorated and ready for her :) so sweet.

Then gigi and papajoe gave her a new tricycle before the party even started and it was a huge hit!  

now every time she rides it {which is a billion times a day} she'll say 'gigi pajo give bike. birthday! cupcakes! remember mommy?'}

For the party we had a cookout with burgers and hotdogs and this delicious cowboy caviar that my mom made :) yum! my sweet friend Kara made the most delicious banana pudding and I made yellow cupcakes. We had a few more snacks like popcorn, animal crackers, lemonade, grapes....

made the garland by cutting out tons of circles and then just sewing them together on my machine. i also made these streamers i found on pinterest from here that were so fun! I forgot to get a picture of them but you can kind of see them in the background. 

found these cute letter balloons at the party store and reese just loved them :) i might have to get more letters because they were fun to play with at home to teach letters and talk about what sounds they make!! great teaching tool!

Like I said, it was freezing! so everyone was gathered around the grill trying to stay warm haha so hilarious. the kids still had fun playing on the slides and the swings and feeding the duckies and eating cupcakes and playing in the bubbles. Wish I had more pictures of the kiddos playing but I was too busy enjoying the fun too :) We sure felt blessed to watch so many sweet people love on our little Reese. We will miss all of our dear friends in Columbia so much! I never ever thought I'd be so sad to leave here...

happy birthday to you little Reeser...

she got a little shy when everyone was singing and staring at her

Couldn't be more blessed to have such a sweet, tenderhearted, spunky, energetic, passionate, goofy two year old daughter. We love you more than words Reesieboo!

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The next day we celebrated Gigi's birthday and drank french press coffee together, played outside, ate a yummy birthday lunch... another fun day!

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And here's Mark and R several weeks earlier celebrating Mark's birthday... 

so many fun people to celebrate during the month of April!