Danny The Idiot - Balloon show party - review

When I had the idea of booking a balloon modeller for the twins' party, I'm so glad I went to Gemma.  She doesn't do balloons but recommended Danny who I immediately booked after hearing what he offers, a whole show of magic, hilarity, balloons and fun.  Perfect!  His show is an hour but he came early to get changed and set up.  We timed the party around it with guests arriving at 10:30 to get the initial excitement over with before his show started at 11, then afternoon tea at 12 followed by general play and the pinata and cake to be finished by 13:30.  It all worked beautifully on the day, helped I think by having just six kids, definitely the way forward people, I really enjoyed it this year as I was able to be so much more organised for a smaller do.

Anyway, Danny started off with some scarf juggling followed by real juggling and was constantly surprising the kids and making them laugh.

Rainbow birthday pinata fun!

We had one more surprise at the end of the party, the pinata.  I had to buy the rainbow pinata by Sunnylife (one of my favourite brands for rainbow stuff) from Paperchase (another favourite shop for bright colours and rainbows)!  I hung it from our banister on landing above the stairs so it could swing and still be secure and not damage anything.

Twins rainbow afternoon tea birthday party

I organised a rainbow afternoon tea party for the twins' 4th birthday and loved it so much! 

I was especially proud of my rainbow jelly!  I managed to find all the colours except blue in Tesco and ordered Jello from amazon to complete the stripes.  I filled some wine glasses and my Tiki Head glass with the extra layers which added more decoration and colour to the table setting.

Halloween Makeup with My Beloved Makeup - review

If you are after a really good make-up artist to do an awesome job of making up your kids (or indeed yourself) for Halloween, I can highly recommend Emese Csoma who runs My Beloved Makeup in Uckfield.  She'll come to your home with her supplies and work her magic to create some amazing designs.  I worked with her recently on a collaboration as I love her designs and she wanted some new photos of her work so she came to paint the twins with Mexican sugar skulls to go with the Day of the Dead outfits I bought last year which were too big!

Due to them still being somewhat un-cooperative at times (ha) and us wanting to aim for early morning light (we were hoping for another foggy morning but at least we got sunshine), she kept it simple with plain white designs which we knew would stand out really well against their Indian toned skin and would be quicker to apply before they got fed up and/or the sun got too high.

Halloween Party Food Ideas

The food for the twins' party last year was so fun!  I got loads of ideas from Pinterest and some were easier than others!  The banana ghosts were the easiest, just chop them in half, draw some spooky faces on and stand them up on a plate.  Job done.  Same with the hard boiled eggs - boil them, draw on faces and they're ready to serve. 

The witches broomsticks were tricky - Nik made these out of cheese strings (NOT my first choice of cheese but this was style over substance clearly), shredded to make the broom ends and straight pretzels inserted in, tied with a chive.  The pretzels were hard to find, good old M&S came up trumps there and the cheese kept splitting where he pushed them in but he did such a great job!  I made the witches fingers out of cocktail sausages with flaked almonds stuck on with tomato chutney to make bloody fingernails.  The vomiting watermelon was easy, just chop off the top, scoop out the melon and turn it upside down, carve a mouth and place the watermelon bits and other fruits coming out of the mouth on a big plate.

I've already written about the epic saga of the cakes - they looked pretty awesome though and took me ages so I'm sharing them again!

The overall Banquet of the Dead looked fab on the spooky tablecloths over two long tables with my big black candelabra and Halloween bunting and various skulls and Halloween crockery to set it all off.

Nik's Mum made the eyeballs for us, simply Babybel cheeses with black sliced olives for the centre and red food colouring painted on for the bloodshot effect.

I had cheese balls in a big bowl with a scary ladle, Twiglets in a skull goblet and I cut pumpkin shapes out of raw carrot which was really easy too, just cut the shape out of one side before you slice them.  I ran out of time to carve the big pumpkins though!

Oh and we also had a "poison" bar for the kids and grown ups.  Coloured orange juice for kids and green dyed gin or blue vodka for the adults!  The red one is some Christmas liqueur I made long ago!

I just love coming up with spooky ideas for Halloween!  Tell me if you have any great ideas to share, I'd love to see photos if you try any of these too!

Halloween Party Ideas

For the twins' 3rd birthday I wanted to have a Halloween party for them.  I'm a big fan of Halloween and love all of the decorations, games, fancy dress and food ideas so I did loads of research in advance, mainly on Pinterest, and came up with a few favourites I wanted to do.  I hired a local village hall in Maresfield to keep the inevitable mess out of my home and had a great time making and baking for the big day.

Woodlands Festival

It's that miserable time of year, Christmas is over, there are no more parties and the weather sucks.  We're all back at work/school and I need things to look forward to!  I'm trying to plan some fun weekends and looking forward to some other exciting adventures we have coming up this year.  After discovering the ultimate fun of a family festival last year, we're booked to attend no less than three this year already!  After our first (and second and third) family festival last year, we're really excited to be discovering more this year.  

A new one for us will be Woodlands Festival which is in June at Elm Wood, near Hawkhurst in Kent.  It's still not too far away so we'll be close enough if we do need to abandon camping with the kids and come home but fingers crossed it all goes as well as the Medieval Festival last year!

This festival looks like another amazing extravaganza of family activities, colourful fun and music.  This video of last year's highlights below looks amazing and I'm in love with that rainbow bunting above!

Off The Wall Entertainment - Christmas disco review

We were thrilled when Gemma from Off The Wall Entertainment invited the twins to come along to her Christmas disco on Christmas Eve eve!

Mums The Word #WildChild Halloween Party - event review

This has taken me longer to write than I hoped but it's the busiest time of year for me with the twins birthday right before the lead up to Christmas, plus my day job has been extra busy and a bit stressful lately plus I'm working on getting bexphoto up and running properly so I'm wearing pretty thin at the moment!  I've also got my first radio chat with Jacqui at Uckfield FM this morning at 11:30!  You can listen in live on the website if you're not local, just follow the Uckfield FM link and click on LISTEN LIVE at the top of the page.  (There's a webcam too so I better get myself organised so I don't look a mess!)

Anyway, as well as being my most busy time of year, October onwards is also one of my favourite times!  I love Autumn, the light and the colours but especially Halloween!  As well as the twins' birthday party being a little early this year with a Halloween theme, we also attended a massive Halloween toddler/baby rave party near Tunbridge Wells at Salomon's Estate.  Run by Mums The Word Events, #Wild_Child parties are events designed just for little ones and their parents.  I first came across them at Joy Festival back in May where they held one in the woods with bubbles, dancing, crafts galore and generally a lot of colour and fun.  I was there without the twins but thought they'd love it so I was thrilled to be invited along to photograph and enjoy their Halloween event with the whole family after meeting the lovely sisters behind Mums the Word at a Mamas Meetup in Brighton (another one I've yet to write about as well as their Mamas Supper Club quiz which was a great laugh).

Blackberry Farm birthday party

The twins were invited along to a birthday party at Blackberry Farm last weekend and had a great time (in between tantrums and clinging to me that is)!  It wasn't our party so I'm not going to "review" it but I will say it was awesome and the twins and all the other kids had so much fun!  I have permission from the Mum to share a few photos with you of her little boy's awesome day out with his friends.

We started off meeting by the cafe before all heading through to the petting area with rabbits and guinea pigs.  Most of the little ones were great, sitting down patiently waiting for their turn to hold or stroke the animals.  The twins were in a bit of a funny mood (possibly related to my stress dealing with a poorly timed tantrum as we left the house - all Priya's fault declaring that it was HER birthday and no one else could have any cake, setting Kalyan off crying and complaining to me that Priya said he couldn't have cake, me telling her it was Eliot's birthday and his cake to share triggering her meltdown - the joys!) so they didn't want to touch the animals and were pretty clingy with me so I didn't get many photos here as Daddy was at work so my camera was swiftly tucked away again.

#wild_child Baby Rave near Tunbridge Wells

We went along to our first ever "Baby Rave" type event run by Mum's The Word today at Salomon's Estate near Tunbridge Wells and had an absolute blast!  Full review to follow but here are a few favourite pics from today :)

Twins' 3rd birthday Halloween food plans!

The most important foodie item at any children's birthday party is cake!  Of course, there will be two cakes as usual for the twins.  They're already excited this year about their cake and blowing out all their candles (we've been to a few parties recently).  They've both asked for carrot cake, I think because they remember Mummy's birthday cake at my BBQ in June which they loved and helped me blow out the candles on.  

I will of course be making said carrot cakes (although K has also mentioned chocolate cake) but need to somehow make them Halloweeny, I'm thinking this monsters will be easy enough and can be made with any kind of cake.  When I mentioned monster cakes to the kids and asked them their favourite colours, P insisted on red and K would like blue or purple.  (I've already bought the right Wilton nozzle for the furry one on the bottom!)

Monster Birthday Cakes

Parties Taylored 4 You

We were invited along to check out a toddler party run by Parties Taylored 4 you in Uckfield recently and the twins had a great time (once they got over being afraid of Spiderman!)

Parties Taylored 4 you organise various themed parties as well as offering personalised children's party services for birthdays or special occasions.  The event we went to was a fancy dress disco with crafts at Ridgewood Village Hall and there was so much for the twins to do!

Polaroid balloons - party ideas by Bex

A really fun and effective way to decorate a room for a party is with lots of balloons.  I saw an idea on Pinterest using a few gold balloons hovering above a dessert table for a bridal shower and each balloon had a photo hanging from it.  I decided to adapt this for my twins' first birthday party but wanted to actually fill the whole dining room.  I have never been accused of being minimalistic!

Since I designed the twins' nursery with a rainbow theme, we've sort of continued that colour scheme into both their naming ceremony and now 1st birthday.  I bought 100 Belbal balloons in ten different bright colours from Click4Balloons (10 for £1.40) and hired a canister of helium which I picked up locally.

I was offered balloon valves (99p for 100) by the website and I'm so glad I bought them as they saved hours of time fiddling with and tying balloons.  You simply pull each balloon opening over the valve and then push that onto the helium nozzle, which fits perfectly, until the balloon is filled and that's it - it self seals.  They also came with the ribbons already tied on so that saved me even more time!

I ordered 96 Polargram polaroids of the twins (together and separate) taken over their first year.  I cut the ribbons to the length I wanted and taped the photos on before inserting the valves and inflating the balloons on the morning of the party.

I had planned to write a wee note on the bottom of each one, for example "Arriving home - 6 days old" or "Bathtime at 25 weeks", but I ran out of time!

Photo by Take Aim Photography

I hope you'll agree, they look really effective!

Photo by Take Aim Photography

Photo by Take Aim Photography 

Photo by Take Aim Photography

Photo by Take Aim Photography

My son is obsessed with balloons and when his great uncle brought him down in his party outfit and he saw them for the first time, he actually gasped in delight!  I wish I could have gotten a picture of his expression as he pointed at the ceiling of balloons.

Photo by Take Aim Photography

I also have a few ideas for what I can do with the photos now that the party's over so watch this space!

The twins' birthday cakes - recipes by Bex

I had a whole day of baking before the twins' birthday as I wanted to make their cakes myself and I wanted them to have one each.  And then I decided there should also be a third cake for a number one.  And then I thought I may as well make a few cupcakes.  I really don't know when to stop!  Anyway, I found a few recipes I liked the sound of and pinned them.  I planned to try them all out before the big day but only managed one practice lemon cake and ended up ruling that one out as it was nice but quite heavy and stodgy and one chocolate cake for Halloween which was a bit dry so I changed the method slightly and baked it for less time.  I wanted nice, light, moist, delicious cakes.  I think I delivered.  I liked them all anyway (although the chocolate one was still a little drier than I'd hoped).

Here are the recipes I used, in case you fancy trying any of them:

I made these cupcakes for their actual birthday so they'd each have a birthday cake on the day.  It was their first ever taste of cake so I made simple vanilla cupcakes using this cupcake recipe from the BBC.

It worked so well and the cakes were delicious (none survived until the party on Saturday!) so I modified it to make the third sponge cake and luckily it came out just as nicely.  I also made another batch of cupcakes and a few teenie tiny cakes for babies.

For Kalyan's cake I used this chocolate cake recipe by Mary Berry and although I put the ganache in the middle, I used the simple buttercream icing from the cupcakes above to ice all of my cakes.

Priya's lemon cake was absolutely delicious and again I used the same simple icing.  I'll definitely be making this one again!

I spent a long time practising smoothing buttercream icing and spent ages trying to get them as smooth as possible.  I was pretty chuffed with the finished result, although they weren't perfect.

I enjoyed spending a bit of time painting the white initial cake toppers.  In retrospect, I wish I'd decorated the number 1 on the middle as well as you can't see it against the white wall!  I left that one white as I used my rainbow sprinkles on the top of that cake.  I also used the mini bunting I made for the rainbow cake I made for the twins' naming ceremony in May.

I always planned to hang them on the twins' bedroom door with an ampersand after they were used on the cakes.

I had even more fun painting the ampersand post party as I had more time to concentrate on it and mixed more colours to get a good rainbow fade.  I used those colours to improve the P and K as well as neatening the patterns as I'd finished them at about 1am the night before the party in a bit of a hurry!  I'd messed up the chevrons a bit but managed to sort them out.  The ampersand is definitely my favourite though.

Sneak Peek - The Twins' 1st Birthday Party - by Bex

SO MUCH FUN!  Many more to come soon but I just had to share a couple few of the amazing photos that Amy took for us at the twins' first birthday party!

 

The twins' first birthday party plans - by Bex

It will come as no surprise that I am enjoying planning the twins' first birthday.  Neither will it be a surprise that I've turned to Pinterest for ideas and inspiration.  I actually saw a lot of ideas when thinking about both my baby shower and the twins' naming day and kept them all on my Twin Party Ideas board.  Although we're keeping it simple with just cake, drinks and a few nibbles, it's a big deal for us to celebrate their very first birthday so I am going all out on a few details to make it special and the wonderful Amy (remember, the mermaid in the field!) is going to take some photos for us so that's one less thing I need to worry about on the day.

On their actual birthday, Wednesday the 11th, we've both taken the day off work (assuming I'll have started by then!!) and will celebrate just us four as a family.  My idea is to have a nice relaxed morning, opening presents from us then head out.  I think we'll probably go to Brighton to the aquarium as I'd love to see their reaction to the sea life, especially as there is an underwater tunnel there.  Another idea I heard from a local mum was to go to Pooh Corner since we live right next to Ashdown Forest (the inspiration for Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood) and let the babies have a crumpet with honey since they are allowed it once they turn one.  To be honest though, I think the aquarium will win as it's more of a day out and will be more photogenic!  We've booked Laura again for the final part of our bump to baby to one year shoot.  I'm hoping we can do the first hour here and the second hour in the aquarium but we might be better just having the two hours in Brighton with Laura.  Either way, I'm excited!

Anyway, back to the party planning, their party will be on the following Saturday and we've invited a few local friends and family.  None of my family can make it but lots of my southern friends (made through blogging), our neighbours and new friends with babies from around here are coming and my in-laws will be here, I think it's going to be a busy house!  I will make the living room the 'baby entertainment room' with the big paddling pool set up as a ball pit in place of the green chair (which will be relegated to the garage along with the coffee table to give us plenty of space), the rainbow play mat with a few toys and the dancing bear toy which is Kalybopper's current favourite, he gets so excited standing up dancing with the little bear, bless him!

As I said in the post about the invitations, there will be a rainbow theme/colour scheme and LOTS of balloons.  I have bought lots of lovely coloured balloons as seen in the picture on the invite and also have a couple of great fun foil balloons which I'll probably attach to their high chairs and some fab rainbow party hats for all the kids.  The twins' ones will be slightly customised to make them special.  (You might have seen them on my Instagram!)  I also want to make a teeny hat for the zebra I used in my Christmas display which I will have on the table with the cakes.

Probably Actually, via Pinterest

I'll be hanging the honeycomb decorations and rainbow bunting from the naming ceremony around the house and have bought some letter bunting to spell out happy birthday in the living room.  I've also made a giant 3D cardboard number 1 which I plan to jazz up somehow (hopefully with glitter!) to decorate either the living room or dining room and use as a photo prop.  Of course, we also need to utilise our chalkboard on the side of the fridge by making it into one of those awesome detail posters about each twin.  I've already bought the colourful chalk pens for this project, I just need to practice neat writing!

Birthday Chalkboard, via Etsy

I've been working on a slideshow of the babies' first year too and plan to have it on the TV in the background.  I'm going to print 100 of my most favourite of the pictures (I am having trouble choosing just 100!) to display as part of the decor too.

Wedding Chicks, via Pinterest

I will be making the birthday cakes myself and have already done one practice cake which I took to pop-in (I've still to try out a chocolate one but there will be a lemon and a plain sponge too).  They will have one cake each and a third cake with a 1 on it.  There can never be too much cake right??

As for their outfits, I've cut out some 1s from some gorgeous rainbow starry fabric to sew onto long sleeved vests.  Their bottom halves are still TBC.  ;)  (Since writing this post I have sewn them and made the mistake of thinking I knew what to do.  Having read a tutorial afterwards, I now know how I could have made them much neater and much more quickly!  I had a bit of bother with the sewing machine getting a bit jammed due to the soft fabrics - I needed some special needles and some iron on stuff to help during the stitching.  Oops.  They look good from a distance though!)

Starry fabric via Amazon

There's also a colourful pom pom project but I don't want to give away everything I have made until I have photos to share after the party.  I'm just waiting on some more hot glue sticks for my gun so I can finish it!!

One of my favourite things I've made is a garland of different coloured circles made from paint swatches I got WAY back in February 2013.  I always had it in mind that it might be good for a colourful nursery.  Now I've finally made it, it's being used as party decor before I find a permanent home for it - maybe in the playroom on the bookshelves.

I've made the party bags up for the children I already know are coming, I've just been filling them as we go to make sure I have the right number and it's one less big job nearer the time!

Party bags via Party Pieces

Hopefully it's going to look bright and colourful with a few personal details, be great fun and something to remember for years to come.  After all, there's only one very first birthday!