Our DIY Sock Monkey Party - Food & Fun Stuff

I'm pretty sure this one is going to turn out to be pretty long. I'm going to tackle all things on the goodies table! We thought long and hard about getting just the right amount of sweets and non-sweets, all while still getting everything to go along with the brown, red and blue theme as closely as possible.

First things first...

 On the "menu"

• grapes in fruit dip
• sausage dip & chips
• seasoned crackers
• Twizzlers
• Tootsie Rolls
• Tootsie Roll pops
• Oreo pops
• cupcakes
• pigs in a blanket
• Coca-Cola in glass bottles
• "monkey juice" which was just homemade cherry limeade
• water with lemons
• cupcakes!

A lot? Sure! But we had a lot of people to feed. We did the friend party on Saturday and family on Sunday. Trust me when I say... my family knows how to eat. :)

Tana is mainly the mastermind behind setting tables and food up. She sees the height and what not of what looks best where. I just add my opinion/approval and occasional suggestion here and there. :)

Saturday's table set up

We used our tiny kitchen table and a card table. We just covered them up with cheapo table cloths. Nearly all the dishes and serving pieces are Tana's or something she borrowed from her grandma (she's actually her Gigi, it sounds weird to call her "grandma" lol). I got the colored forks and spoons from a party store in Tulsa. If you buy the colored ones from Walmart, you have to also buy the knives... I don't need the knives... I don't want the knives. I would have had to buy a bunch from Walmart to get as many as I got at the party store. They are just sitting in a little vase I bought for $1 at the Dollar Tree (where everything's $1!!) The brown plates and the napkins are also from the party store. The red plates... are Hefty plates that I bought at Walmart a long time ago when I first started planning for the party. Funny story on the napkins... I was doing every single napkin, every other one red, brown, red, brown, etc. Tana grabbed a stack and put them in chunks of red, brown, red, brown. LOL! SO much cuter and soooo much easier! The ribbons tied around each different dish, I got that idea from this.

I think ours actually turned out cuter than these!

SO cute!! What great colors this would be for a summer party!

I even took their "monkey vines" and "monkey juice" ideas from the top picture. Ours are way cuter, dontcha think?! We just wrapped the ribbon around how we wanted it, taped it on, and then carefully (as to not move the ribbon!) taped on the food label.

Aren't those labels cute?! Tana whipped those up in a jiffy, no problem! :) And the ribbon adds such a CUTE detail. Oh, and by the way, that sock monkey jack-in-the-box that normally sells at Target for $15... yeah, i got that at the Goodwill for $3 in perfect condition. That's right! Underneath him is a leftover foam block to give him a little height.

You might like to know... we totally rigged up this "punch bowl" here. It is a cake lid stuck inside of a little circle vase/bowl thing I purchased for $1 at Dollar Tree. And that fancy ladle there, lol, courtesy of the kitchen of yours truly. That was one detail I forgot completely about. Oh, well... saved me more money than if I had I thought about it! And that is Tana's glass pitcher... may she rest in peace... she was so pretty. Tana broke her by accident. :(

The cupcakes are a tragedy turned good, in and of themselves. I terrible thing happened with the cake mixes that never rose. I had made several batches prior to party day. I had perfected them down to an art. The day of I made FOUR batches and not one cupcake turned out right. Walmart had these cupcakes, minus the sprinkles, sitting out waiting on me t-minus one hour to the party. We sprinkled them with brown, red, and white sprinkles and stuck my home-made-with-love cupcake toppers on top.

Red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing... yum!

This is Gigi's cupcake stand. I yike it.

Ok, these toppers were made using a circle cutter. I used 3 different colors of card stock for the backs of them, and then Tana made the monkey, "Jake" and "1" circles. Then I put them on lollipop sticks. Perfect! And very personalized! They turned out ridiculously cute, if I do say so, myself.

The Tootsie Roll pops and Oreo pops needed to be stuck into something so they stood upright and showed off their cuteness instead of being all stacked together and boring. I saw some foam blocks wrapped in wrapping paper on some blogs. They were so cute! Tana saw a roll of brown paper that Derick actually uses when painting in the house one day and we both thought it would look so cute to wrap Jake's presents in it. I didn't end up doing that, but we DID use it on the foam blocks and they were CUTE!!

where I got the idea of a wrapped foam block to stick our stuff in.

This is Pioneer Woman's cake pops... Tana, yours are WAYYYYY better. No offense to Mrs. Drummonds, but I am sure you all will agree that the pops look a lot better standing up.

Too cute, right? I got that red twine stuff at Michael's in a roll, and I pretty much love it. I just asked Derick about the paper, he said it came from Lowe's. I have never checked into it, but I'm sure you can find it elsewhere too. Idk about the price, or anything, either. It was just a "lying around the house" kind of thing.

These took FOREVER for Tana to make and she did excellent! It was a very long, very tedious learning experience and there were a ton of mess ups to get all these beauties, but that just meant more for us to enjoy! ;)

Our cute little Tootsie Pop stand.

I'm pretty sure I'll blog about the delicious recipes for the sausage dip, seasoned crackers, Oreo balls and grapes in fruit dip, at some point. Because everyone needs these things in their house at one point, or another!

I think that pretty much covers the food table.

I have gotten positive feedback from several different people about this little "series", if you will, that I'm doing on DIY partying. I can not wait to see photos of your kiddos' parties!!

Our DIY Sock Monkey Party - The Birthday Banner

Next on the list is the birthday banner.

I couldn't decide in which order to go, or which creation to blog about next, so I just went to the pictures and picked the first thing. So, next up!

First of all, the pictures I'm going to show... I am well aware that these parties are FAR cuter than anything I could pull off. There are some seriously CUTE party ideas out there!! I didn't realize how awesome you could make a party be and all without breaking the bank!! I'd already decided on sock monkeys, so I stuck with it. They're so stinkin' cute, anyhow. I wanted a banner to go above Jake's seat. I wanted to look similar to this.

I saw this banner while I was searching for examples to post just a moment ago. I wished I'd seen this before I made my own. This is SO CUTE!!! I found it at Bayou Moon, where she makes some crazy awesome stuff! Seriously! Go look!!

And this is what I made from the first image above.

I had already cut a ton of stuff with the circle cutter and was so over that dang thing. It is VERY time consuming, those circle cutters! So, I already knew I was going to be going with squares for the letters. I had left over card stock from making everything else, so I used that for the background weird polygon/pentagon thing. Since that would be pretty plain by itself, I needed a fun ribbon to hang it up with. It would have looked pretty plain with just the letter on a solid card stock and plain ribbon. Ish. So, I used polka dot ribbon. Brown polka dot with the red ones, and red polka dot with the blue. I had some left over cut out monkey circles so I put those on each end of each word. I didn't have enough ribbon to dangle down, which I really wanted... so I just had to tack it up instead. Oh, well. I made it at around 1am the day OF the party. Procrastination at its best. I like to think Tana and I function better that way, anyhow. :) So, anyway, I really don't think it's perfect. I would have preferred longer ribbon and if I had more time, I would have made the letters in all lower case instead of upper case. It turned out fine for the party. It got a lot of compliments. And Jake could've really cared less about any of it. Let's face it, the first few parties are for the mom anyhow. Once the kid gets a say in it, it starts being character themed and all that unoriginal nonsense. Ick. I used ribbon, the printed letters on white card stock, blue and red card stock, left over monkey circles that I'd already made (which I'll cover another day) a paper cutter thing (not really sure exactly what it's called) to make sure it was all cut just right, martha stewart paper glue, and a hot glue gun to glue it all to the ribbons. See how simple!? All it really cost was the red ribbon, so $1.50. Everything else, I already had. To buy one of these from Etsy, it would cost you right around $25 + shipping. I'll take my $1.50 banner, thanks. :)

This is what it ended up looking like above his chair.

pretty cute, right?!

 So, there you have it. Party on a budget, but still lookin' pretty darn cute!

Our DIY Sock Monkey Party - The Invitation

I wanted to share with you the details of Jake's first birthday party. My best friend, whom I mention a lot of on here, Tana, and I created everything... and I do mean every single bit of the party decor. I had decided, back in August, when J was just 6 months old, that I wanted his first birthday to be sock monkey themed. And not just character themed, I wanted a more sophisticated (idk if that's the right word I'm really looking for) not just a bunch of store bought stuff. I wanted it to be really great. :) And I do think it was, if I say so myself! Anyway, I started googling, and searching Etsy for the cutest things I could find. I found several that I loved, but there was one that I loved the most. We used the idea from the one we loved and took it from there. You can, indeed, purchase the products from Etsy, but I knew we could do it, no problem. So, I decided that since I had the time, and the energy... and the best friend with skills, that we would tackle it ourselves and I could save some major money!

This is the invite from the theme I fell in love with on Etsy.

Today, I am going to start with the invitation to the party. I used the idea and the wording from an invitation I saw on Etsy back in August. I did a little session with Jake wearing his sock monkey hat one afternoon. Then I took my favorite picture from the sitting and created the invitation in Photoshop. I am sure that it might be a lot easier to use Picnik.com if you are unfamiliar with, or do not have access to Photoshop. I preferred Photoshop for this particular project due to its ability to pay attention to the finer details.

After I had the invitation just how I wanted it, with all the layers and everything just in the right places, I needed to have it printed. Now in the past, I have used Shutterfly for printing, and I still use them for all of my personal photo needs. And while Shutterfly does do an amazing job, they tend to run a tad on the pricey side for things like invites.

You remember when we were kids, our invitations came in a package of 12 or 24 from the store and you filled in the blanks with the details? Yeah, well... I wanted to avoid that! Anyway, 21st century birthday parties are SO much cuter than the fill in the blank parties, in my opinion.  Since my goal was for saving money, I needed a better option than Shutterfly for this particular project. Not that I am a photo snob, okay, maybe I am... but with good reason! It's part of what I do and who I am. So, that said, I do not... do not... use one-hour retail type places that also sell food, clothing and prescriptions all in the same store, for my printing needs (unless it is a last minute emergency, and even then I find myself upset that I did it) because they always turn out less than desirable. Their printing is not quality printing, it's cheap for a reason. Anyway, so I needed to get these invites printed without breaking the bank. Tana suggested that I check into Vistaprint. I have never done anything like this through Vistaprint, so I was a bit skeptical, but let me tell you... they turned out spectacular!! It did take quite a bit of time to get the invite to where it would print out just right without cutting something off. But after I figured that out, it was smooth sailing. I ended up putting the invitation I'd created on the front, and an adorable picture of Jakey on the back. It's a double-sided invitation, and the receivers of the invite have a cute little picture of J to keep on their fridge now that the party is over. :)

I leave you with the finished product!

The front of the invite

Note that the date is different from when the actual party was, due to the crazy blizzard, (which I should add, does NOT normally happen to us in Oklahoma) we had the week before causing us to postpone the partying.

The back of the invite

And here is a picture of the actual invite. It's clearly not a great picture, as it was taken with my phone, but you get the idea, at least. :)

So, let's talk pricing. I suppose I could have bought invites from the store, since they do still make those. They would have been about $15-$20 for as many as I needed. But, like I said earlier, my style is not so much on the store bought type stuff side. So, this really wasn't even an option. I also could have printed an invite through a retail store, but this was also not what I was looking for. If I had done that with the style I used above, for instance, I checked walmart... it would have run around $50-$55. I have not been impressed with their printing, in the past, so I skipped them. I checked Shutterfly... I don't even wanna go there. I already know that they would have looked amazing, but they also would have been expensive. And by expensive, I mean like $80-100 easily for the kind of invite I was going for. I had never used Vistaprint, so it really was a gamble, and I definitely sacrificed the user-friendly interface walmart and shutterfly have. Putting that invite together on Vistaprint was not easy, I will be completely honest about that! Anyway, I got 40 front-back, color, matte finish--which I LOVE, envelope included invites for for $44, shipping included. And they arrived to my house in less than a week after I ordered them. Which means they printed and shipped them in less than a week. I selected up to 2 week shipping, so I was pleasantly surprised to receive them as quickly as I did.

So, there you have it. The beginning of how we created a spectacular birthday bash, sock monkey style. :) Have a happy Monday! Ours will be filled with lots of resting after a wild, fun, birthday celebrating weekend! Well, after we run to the store for milk.

On this day...

Jake Ryan
2-6-2010
9:14pm

On this day, the Lord blessed our lives more than we could have ever imagined. The most beautiful baby I'd ever laid eyes upon was placed into my arms at 9:14pm after 14 hours of labor. It was, without a doubt, the best day of my life, thus far. This child has changed everything about my life. From the tiniest details to the biggest. The most important thing he's changed is love. He's changed the way I view life, the way I view love. I have never loved my husband more now, as a father, than I ever have loved him. The love that was created in my heart for the tiniest of people was the most powerful feeling I have ever felt. The way I love my parents has forever changed, because it shines a light on how they feel for me. It is so true when they that you'll never understand your parents' love for you until you have your own. I understand.

Leaving you with a couple of my favorite pictures from the day Jake was born. I've posted them before, but today they are worth posting again. And some, I have never posted before! :) Enjoy!

Happy Birthday, Jake Ryan!!!!

I will never be able to explain the feeling that I feel at that moment.

I have so many pictures of Derick kissing on his baby boy, this one is my favorite.

captivating eyes, even at birth. people have commented on them since the day he was born.

I LOVE his little face in this one!!!

Absent

My friends, my readers, I have wanted to tell you this story for weeks now!!! One would think, after the year we have been through, with jobs, houses, depression, etc., that we/I would get a break somewhere. Well, we did! So we thought, anyhow.

If you kept up with, or started reading from the beginning of our story, you would know that it was not an easy task to get pregnant with Jake. I had to take medicine because we could not conceive on our own, due to my ovary issues. I have heard stories over and over of how having a baby could fix infertility problems. Derick and I had decided that we really wanted to have at least our first two kids fairly close together. So, we started trying to get pregnant in around October/November. We were pretty diligent in tracking things and it just wasn't happening. In December I was like, you know, it's not happening and I'm just tired of peeing on the ovulation sticks and tracking things. So, we stopped "trying". I didn't track anything that month. Well, mid-January I still hadn't gotten my "monthly". I was at my best friend's house and we were talking about how my cycle was going on like 38 days. I just blew it off as my weird cycles coming back. I was actually going to call the office the next Monday, and get things going to start Clomid again. Well, I knew I needed to take a pregnancy test before I went in to talk about Clomid. I'd sure look like an idiot if I happened to be pregnant. Tana had a test at her house so I took it. I was not at all expecting to see anything good, so I really wasn't looking forward to looking at it. Tana got up to look at it, so I jumped up to look too. We saw it at the same time and it said very clearly... PREGNANT. I COULD NOT believe my eyes!! My body can make babies on its own!!!! I was actually right around 5 weeks 3 days, when I found out. A huge change from the 3 weeks 5 days with Jake. I was excited because I wasn't going to have to wait as long to go to the doctor, either!

I made my appointment for the day of 7 weeks. In the mean time, I had ZERO pregnancy symptoms other than peeing a lot more than usual. No sore boobs, no nausea, nothing. I googled and googled because I was certain it meant something bad. There were mixed reviews, so I remained optimistic. I also asked Dr. Optimistic if it meant anything and he was quick to say that pregnancy doesn't have to be a miserable thing.

I went in at 7 weeks, terrified of not seeing a heart beat on the sonogram. Same thing as always... naked from the waste down, feet in stirrups, bottom to the end of the table, ultrasound time. On the screen was a tiny little sac. There was no baby, there was no heart beat. Just what I feared. It was measuring what a 5 week pregnancy would measure. This was not great news according the doctor. I was sent home to come back in a week to see how things looked.

The week that followed, I had basically prepared myself for a miscarriage. I was no longer pregnant, in my mind. I hated to feel that way, should the pregnancy continue. But I felt like, for my emotional status, I needed to detach myself from this pregnancy and let go.

I started bleeding on Monday evening. My appointment was Wednesday. My sweet friend, Kristi, went with me to keep an eye on Jake, and quite frankly, to keep me company because I was prepared for bad news--a confirmed miscarriage. Got in the office, bottoms off, feet up in stirrups, bottom to the end of the table, ultrasound time. What was there, you ask? A 6 week embryo... with a heart beat! But I was still bleeding. So, miscarriage was still a likely possibility. It is referred to as a threatened miscarriage. I was sent home again, to come back in another week. I thought to myself that this was going to get really old if I had to continue to come back week after week. Dr. Optimistic said he thought things were looking better and that a heart beat was a really positive thing. I left not knowing how to feel. I continued to bleed, not bad, but still bleeding, nonetheless.

The next morning I had bible study. I went and everything was relatively ok. Bleeding was light, but then about 10am I started cramping pretty good. By the time I got home at noon, it was pretty bad. Like it felt like a constant contraction. Not the braxton hicks kind... like the kind after your water breaks. But constant. It didn't let up. I went to bathroom shortly after we got home and passed a clot and started bleeding pretty good. I called my friend, Kristi, who was very quick to come and help take care of Jake while I... bled and cramped.

Dr. Optimistic had told me that if my bleeding got worse, or if I wanted to, to come in on Friday instead of waiting a week. So, I made my appointment for Friday morning. I passed 2 more clots, the last one being last night. My appointment was today. This morning and my mom went with me. I went in expecting nothing. I had no idea what to expect after thinking I was miscarrying, then seeing and hearing a heart beat, then bleeding and cramping for 2 days. So, as always... bottoms off, feet in stirrups, bottom to the end of the table, ultrasound. What was there, you ask? An empty uterus with a thicker than normal lining. I had passed all products of conception in the time between Tuesday and Friday.

I am definitely at peace with the whole thing by now. I was very upset upon the initial examination at 7 weeks. I worked it out, and am at peace. There was a reason that little baby did not make it.

One good thing out of the whole event... I can make babies!!!!

So, I'll definitely take any and all prayers still, even though the whole thing is over. I would expect some emotions to crop up occasionally. But, having Jake definitely, definitely makes things a ton easier on the emotions. For one, he keeps me occupied. And for two, I already have a munchkin, so I wasn't nearly as desperate this time as I was the first time. I'm pretty sure I would need to have been institutionalized had this happened the first time!!!

Anyway, this explains my absence from the world of blogging in the past week, or so. I really wanted to blog about it, because I feel like it is often times viewed as such a shameful thing. It is not!! It is so much more common than one might think!! Did you know 15% of pregnancy result in miscarriage? That's 1 out of every 5-6 pregnancies. That's huge! So, if you are lucky enough to never have had one... count yourself very, very blessed!!

Happy weekend, my friends.

An absolute train wreck

This post is dedicated to one of mine and Derick's very regrettably, all time favorite shows...  Toddlers & Tiaras. Yes, you read that right. We love that show. We, let me rephrase that... Derick (who convinced me) is so completely against the idea of pageants, yet we still tune in weekly to watch that train wreck of a show! Why do we watch, you ask? Honestly, we watch to make fun of and mock the parents, mostly. If you have not seen the show, let me explain to you what happens.

Basically, they start off by showing 2 or 3 different girls, all entered in the same pageant. Usually, these girls have 3 completely different up-bringings. Whether it be only child, only girl after 3 boys, 1 of many pageant girls, etc. Some are so wealthy they take private jets to the pageant, and some are completely white-trashed out families that will spend thousands (this is no exaggeration) and thousands of dollars on one single pageant where the grand prize (taken home by the prestigious ultimate grand supreme) is usually a couple hundred to maybe a thousand bucks. These girls usually have one thing in common-- a most insane attitude and downright disrespectfulness towards their parents, and usually mostly their mothers. Also, their mothers, and sometimes fathers, are usually extremely...extremely kooky! I have seen these girls slap their mothers, spit at them, yell nasty things at them, order them around. And what do the mothers do? Drop everything and respond to their every beck and call because they are more interested in that grand prize than the child is, in most cases. They fill these toddlers (who desperately need a nap) with coffee, soda, sugary foods, all in order to keep them in a good mood and not get tired. They send them up on stage in their crazy get-ups to do the cheesiest "talent" routines, beauty, sometimes swimwear, or "wow" wear. We have watched episode where these tiny little girls are practically dressed like strippers.

And then let's talk about the absolutely ridiculous lengths these people will go to in order to make their little toddler look like a... let's face it... a whore. Derick swears these children are being trained to be strippers or exotic dancers. And why wouldn't they?! They are paraded around after they have been spray tanned, buy flippers (a set of fitted extremely white, extremely perfect fake teeth worn to cover up those cute little snaggle teeth) fake hair--which is usually done by a hair stylist on location $$, fake nails $$, fake eyelashes $$, makeup so thick you could scoop it off--which is usually applied by a professional makeup artist $$. Even the pictures that they use to enter "Most photogenic" portions of the pageant are so ridiculously fake! Let me just show you a couple.

I will be the first one to agree that photo enhancements are a good thing... but not to the point where it looks like a completely different person!! People, this is not enhancement this is like graphic art illustration!!

This doesn't even begin to cover how absolutely retarded the vain world of child pageantry is these days. If I could sum it up in one word... repulsive. Yet, we still come back to the show week after week.

I'll tell you what the majority of these kids and parents need... a real good whoopin!

So, thank you, TLC, for the train wreck of a show you provide your viewers. But really, I feel incredibly sorry for these little girls who will grow up to find, one day, that the plastic trophies and crowns (because no one walks away empty handed) they received were all purchased by their parents who were duped into thinking this was a way to judge the true beauty of their child.

busy crafting

Guys! I'm up to my eyeballs in first birthday crafting!! Tana and I are hard at work on all the sock monkey decorations. I have to say, it is incredibly cheap to craft your own birthday party decorations! It is so easy. But it is very time consuming!! And I know... the kid will never remember this day. But it's man, if I wanna go all out... mama's gonna go all out!! I can hardly contain the excitement I have for this day!

It's actually gonna be two days. We decided on a friends party and a family party. That way he's not so incredibly overwhelmed with tons of people all at one time. I'm not sure if he'll be completely weirded out by all the people in our house, or just whatever about it. I do know one thing, once he gets used to all the people being there, he will steal the show. It's a good thing the day is about him, because if it weren't, I am certain he would make it that way.

Anyway, that's literally about ALL that's going on in our little casa de Pickles.

I just ordered some new cloth diapers today and I can't WAIT to get them in the mail!!