Birthday Party and Soup of the Week

This weekend was Alpha's 4th birthday party, and I have to say I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. He wanted an Angry Birds themed party, so with the prodding of my mama bestie (evil glint in her eye), I turned to Pinterest. Oh Pinterest.

Alpha

Don't ask me why I decided to do so much work for a 4th birthday party. Will he even remember this? Who knows. I sure don't remember too much from when I was 4. Maybe because I was on maternity leave and had the time to pull it all together? Maybe because I'm insane? Maybe a little of column A and a little of column B?

At any rate, it turned out fantastic. The weather was hot and beautiful the way May hasn't been up here in the frozen north for many years. The kids had a water fight, threw water balloons at a giant king piggy target I painted, and generally ran amok. The littler siblings crawled around, ate dirt and sat in the water table. The only hitch came when I decided that they should play a "party game" aka throw a giant red bird frisbee at piggy milk jugs I had made. Oh wait, 4 year olds don't like to take turns? Whoops. There was a bit of crying and pouting on that one. My bad.

Everything was fairly quick and easy to do too. Here is a breakdown:

Decor:

Lanterns and crepe paper - fairly standard crepe streamers, balloons (the package I was sent had green and red, left over from Christmas perhaps?). I took cheap paper lanterns bought at the dollar store, printed off faces from the internet (there are numerous sites where you can purchase templates for bird and piggy faces) and taped them on. My sister-in-law then hung them from the windows and lights to make a cute effect.

Batteries not included.

Food:

Here's where we got creative. Pinterest got us started with a few ideas from other wonderful people much smarter than I, and then we ran with it to get all the food that we wanted.

Red bird: strawberries and bananas (dipped in lemon juice to prevent discolouration), with blueberry accents and an orange crescent beak.

Piggy snouts: sliced cucumbers, I used a big drinking straw to puncture the cucumbers to make the nostrils.

Yellow bird: sliced yellow peppers, with olive accents, mozza eyes and orange pepper beak.

Blue bird: blueberry bowl with mozza eyes and orange crescent beak

Black bird: blackberry bowl with mozza eyes and orange crescent beak/eyebrows

Piggy punch: I made lemon/lime punch (and added some green food colouring to get it a bit greener), and taped on some cardboard eyes and snout to my jug. 

White Bird and Piggy

Red bird and Yellow bird

Pizzas: I bought a 4 pack of cheese pizza and then added decoration and more cheese ('cause come on. Cheese). I also had friends coming with different dietary restrictions (thankfully no vegans, due to all the cheese) so I had to make sure they had something too. White bird (from Pinterest) is plain cheese with olive accents and an orange pepper beak. I used fresh slices of mozza to make all the eyes. Piggy was mushrooms (under the cheese) and spinach, with a cucumber nose. Red bird was the other from Pinterest, with pepperoni, cheese and yellow pepper beak. Yellow bird was ham and pineapple. They turned out super well, and I'm glad I made the investment of 2 more pizza trays, so I could just pop them in the oven without any transfer. The kids mostly ate the cheese, and the adults enjoyed the more "sophisticated" ones.

Party games:

I had 2 main games set up. The first went over really well. Alpha doesn't like water splashing, so a plain old water fight was right out. Instead, I painted a big target on a piece of plywood, and put king piggy in the middle. I then blew up a bunch of water balloons and the kids had a fantastic 30 seconds whipping them at king piggy. The paint ran and now he looks like something out of a horror movie.

Ok so he did before too.

The other, as I mentioned, didn't go well with this age group, but they still sort of had fun, after they were done having a tantrum. I painted a bunch of milk jugs green, and printed off some piggy faces and glued them on. The kids then could knock them down like bowling balls. 

Lastly, my latest Soup

So I have this amazing cookbook, 400 Soups. It has soups from around the world, stocks, vegetable descriptions and tips. It also has colour photo pictures of the different steps of preparation to get a better idea of what you need to do. If you're like me, and want to do more cooking but are overwhelmed by the amount you don't know, this book is perfect. 

Anyway, I made a chilled roasted pepper soup from this book for a family lunch. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about chilled soups. They almost seem to be missing the point? However, this one was very tasty, and easy to prepare. It involved roasting veggies, blending them and then mashing them through a strainer to get the pulpy bits out. It gets points for ease of preparation, cheapness of ingredients, but looses some for a bit blandness of flavour and chilled soup not really being soup. Alpha tasted it but did not want, and Omega gobbled it up (being a baby she doesn't know any better I guess).  I would give it a rating of: my first choice of soups if I'm entertaining vegans on a hot summer's day. 

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