Celebrate Good Times!

Last week Aedan had a birthday party at the Orpheum Museum and had friends and family in attendance.  We like going to the museum but often times there aren't kids his age to play with and so this was a real treat for him to have his friends there.  Aedan's favorite part of the museum is the elaborate train table they have and so we used his favorite characters Thomas the Tank Engine and friends for cake, gift bags, invites, etc.  Ok, truth be told, I was the one that probably got the most excited about train stuff for the party and this is why...

Aedan loves "cuppy capes" and so do I for the convenience value.  Rather than decorate each individually I put them all together and decorated it like a whole cake.  They do that at local grocery bakeries but I had too much fun doing it myself.

To do this I first frosted a single layer of frosting (white) over all the cupcakes to make one continuous surface (there will be little hills as it is hard to get every cupcake to bake to the same height). Then I decorated on top: Thomas is the candle, the bridge was a cut up plastic cup frosted over, the sand is finely ground graham crackers, the rocks are chocolate covered raisins (don't spend $$ on rock candy, these work great), and the rest is colored frosting.  The only piping I did was the train tracks (used a plastic sandwhich bag) and the bushes (needed a star tip for that) and I put little circle sprinkles on the bushes for flowers. 

We started off the party by having free play time at the museum for about 1.5 hours.  It was the perfect day to go - we were the only ones there except for three kids so it almost looked like we rented out the place :) 

They had some fun play time with Thomas and Friends...

The little ones commandered a river boat....

They dug up fossils/threw sand at each other...

They climbed around and played and played!

Like I said in a recent post, after we got home, Aedan sighed and said, "We had fun!" and proceeded to tell me that we need to do it again and again.  Thanks to all the kids and moms/dad who came!  We had fun! And apparently we will have to do it again sometime!