Lydia's Second Birthday Party!

Lydia's mother, Lindsey, sent in these amazing pictures from Lydia's big birthday party bash! Seriously, folks, take a few minutes to check out all the fine details in Lindsey's artwork. These pictures and ideas are sure to cause a simultaneous world-wide round of applause!

Lindsey writes:

I emailed Gabbafriends awhile back about 8 bit music (thanks a lot for the tip, it worked out great) & now that the party insanity is over, I thought I'd send you our pics to go up on Gabbafriends!

I was very happy with how my baby girl Lydia's birthday turned out! She hit the big 2 this year & while I was completely against her watching ANY tv when she was born, Yo Gabba Gabba is just her THING. She loves it, & so do we, it's a big thing in our house. We use it as rewards after bath time or to calm her when she's not feeling good or in the hospital (we're there a lot, Lydia was born with small lungs & has a trach, among other things), so it was a no-brainer that if we were going to give her the best birthday possible, it had to be YGG themed.

Her dad & I knew about the birthday express decorations, but we also are a pretty artsy family, too. So we decided to try & paint big backgrounds of each land & have an activity to go with each. I also wanted a Gabba cake, YGG music & Lydia to have a dress like the girls wore in the earlier episodes.

But it all started with Lydie's invites. I didn't want it to be overly Gabba & underly homemade looking, so I used a scrapbook look from a site I learned about through GabbaFriends. :)

Then we had to figure out the dress. I've never made a dress from scrap before (let alone from a tiny mobile pic of a paused tv screen), but once I got the pattern down, it was all downhill from there. Lydia really likes it & she still wears it! Here's the birthday girl:

Then we had the backgrounds. We ended up not doing Foofa's or Plex's because we ran out of time (Plex barely even has his own place anyways; sad!) but no one missed it.

For Toodee's "ice" land we had a sno cone station:

For Muno's "rocky" land, we had Pin the Eye on Muno, with a cyclops blindfold, & rock candy for prizes! (We sort of forgot to take pictures of any of the kids playing. Whoops):

For Brobee's, we did the Party-In-My-Tummy bean bag toss game, that I saw first on GabbaFriends. The prize was Brobee cone hats! The bean bags only took me a day; I made them out of coverall canvas fabric & filled them with dried barley (it was an empty cupboard kind of day), & I had great brush-tipped fabric markers that I used for the faces. For the tree trunk (thought an actual stomach would be kinda morbid) I wrapped layers of big brown paper bags (used to hold grains) & spray painted & hand painted it.

For Foofa's land, I melted down crayons by color & poured them into 3-inch flower-shaped cake pans to make JUMBO tie dye crayons. I displayed them in a big flower pot with green rafia at the bottom & let the kids have at a table we covered in paper.

A few of the crayons; they went fast!

A lot of the adults liked them too :D

Some of the resulting artwork!

For plex, we chose an activity that wasn't meant for the very little kids; kind of an extra for the bigger kids, that we saw on nickjr.com.

We bought gear & washer shaped beads in YGG-esque colors, wooden round beads in Plex colors, found heavy-duty springs & other beads for robot bracelets, & we had them out with the Plex blow outs from birthday express

That Plex hat is something I made for Lydia prior to the party; we were wearing it along with the others on & off throughout the party.

Here is a pic of the hats all together:

For DJ lance (I didn't want to leave him out) we made a DJ Lance face cut out, & while it never got completely finished, looking back, I think that might have been the favorite of the party.

Then there was the pinata, the standard DJ Lance boombox with the matching party favor boxes from online. We had the YGG stickers along with Glo Bracelets & the retro 80's slot sunglasses in Gabba Colors. The Muno blindfold came in handy here:

We also had a light show going at the same time, with a mix of YGG songs & Gabba-esque 8 bit music we got from the 8 bit Collective; they sounded a lot like the song clips the show uses in between segments:

This is my brother approving of the choice of favors:

We had the Party In My Tummy buffet, with orange sorbet based punch & a rainbow fruit platter (didn't last long!) & I painted the banner & made picks for the fruit out of felt & bamboo skewers (Gabba colors of course):

The cake was done by one of my best friends, who took it upon herself to make every layer a different kind of cake, a different land & hand sculpt all the characters out of sugar for the top. The cake, ALSO didn't last long; it was beyond delicious:

At the last minute, I strung a string of Gabba Balloons, with help from Nick Jr. Puppet printables:

I also made a few extras around the party like a pair of pennant banners for the front & back of the house, in Gabba-esque schemes; the larger of which is now up in her room :D I also made a dress for me to wear at the last minute out of remaining material. This is the clearest picture of my dress, second from the left :)

Lydia already has a lot of YGG toys, so she only got a few for her actual birthday. Here's a shot of Lydia visiting with a couple of our friends & the lone Brobee doll atop the pressie pile! Her most special present this year was a charm bracelet I made her, with her name spelled out in sign, along with an I Love You sign charm. Since she's trached, she uses sign to supplement her communication.

However, she did also get a jumpolene with fun balls & a fish named Mr. Scraps who lives in her room! :

There were lots of other things for the kids to do, there were outdoor toys to ride on & a big trampoline to bounce on. It was by far the most fun kids birthday party I've been to; so worth all the work.