Rectification

Despite my lament in February about how I had forgotten to document the girls birthday parties and Rachel's in particular, and then the subsequent promises that I would do better this year, it has now been nearly two months since the last birthday party and it still remains undocumented. Alas. Hold onto your hats though, because the situation is about to be rectified.

Rachel. Rachel, Rachel, Rachel. What can I say, the girl loves her bugs. When I asked her this year what kind of party she would like, she instantly responded with: "bug party!" "But you had a bug party last year," I countered, but she was not to be reasoned with. Bugs it was, from invites to cakes. Bugs.

As the girls get older, I love to include them in the party prep process. Sophie coloured her own invites in January, and so Rachel helped to create these ones. I did the cutting of the circles, but Rachel did the black spot painting (with Hugo's help), and the gluing of all the bits together, including the googly eyes we added at the end.

Party food was pretty similar to last year, although the sweets were a bit different I guess. Fruit salad and veggie sticks with dip are party standards. They make things feel healthy. That enormous platter of fruit was devoured by the kids pretty quickly I have to say.

These meringue caterpillars are really cute and pretty easy. Just make the meringue and then pipe them into squiggly shapes.

I was going to make these cupcakes lady bugs like I did last year, but I had an excessive amount of green icing left over from the cake, and it looked like grass, so it was easy to just do different bug shapes on them.

Birthday cake! Even though we were repeating the bug theme, I did manage to have some sway with the birthday cake, not wanting to repeat the lady bug cake again, just because I like things to be different. This is the butterfly cake from the Women's Weekly Birthday Cake Book, which Rachel liked when I told her I could make it blue (not yellow like the picture in the book).

I didn't want to have to figure out how to divide it up between 25 hungry party guests though, so that butterfly is flying over a field of green with flowers on it. After we sang Happy Birthday, everyone simply got handed a cupcake. So much easier! I did cut up the cake and put it into containers for people to take home though. 

Here is Rachel eating a snail scroll. It was a great morning and we were blessed with some amazing winter weather. Brisbane winter this year has been phenomenal.

And that is the end of the party. My one lament is that there was no bunting. I had lent it to the kindy for the fete a couple of weeks earlier. One of the well meaning mums had taken it home to wash and I didn't get it back in time. Oh well.