This (incredibly long) birthday post brought to you by the letter M and the number 2...

Molly had been talking about her birthday party for awhile and her only requests were cake and strawberry ice cream.  Check and check.  I wouldn't say that she has a dedicated interest or hobby as of yet, I mean a toddler's tastes are ever changing.  But since her cast days when she started watching television she's been a dedicated "Street" fan (that's what the cool kids call it).  I saw some Sesame Street cake pops one day long ago at bakerella.com (a followed favorite of mine) and filed them away in my brain as a second birthday theme possibility (I love a theme!).  I thought maybe her love for all things Sesame would wane so I held off on pursuing it but once I mentioned it to her it was a clear winner.  So, right before school started I made up some invites for our shindig and mailed them on out to our family. 

I knew I didn't want to buy a bunch of premanufactured licensed party merchandise--not cause there's anything wrong with it but because I get some kind of weird kick out of taking the time consuming route (oh, and I needed the cost of this thing to be somewhere around...FREE)--so I got out my box of paper scraps and funky scissors and experimented with what I could make from them.  Turns out Sesame Street monsters are incredibly easy to recreate and thus began my put-eyes-on-everything approach to her party decor.  In fact all the decorations were made from paper scraps or stuff I already had.  Score.

So, Saturday evening came and it was finally time for M's Sesame Street Soiree.  Gordon, Maria, and Bob couldn't make it but we had a whole other cast of characters in attendance!  Prior to party time, MiMi, Pop, Ryan and I got everything set up just right.

Molly posed for a few pictures on the table before we set out the food.  She'd been smitten with my diaper-box characters all week (they'd been living in the playroom until party time) and as soon as she saw the birthday sign she said, "Mommy, look!  It's Sesame Street".  Mission accomplished. 

The light posts are old props (from Annie) that I had to clear out of my storage area for the summer. I also had an old can of almost-full green spray paint.  Voila!  Street lights!

The three of us donned S.S. t-shirts for the occasion and Molly still fit in the tutu I made her for Thoroughly Modern Millie.  Obligatory birthday tutu?  Check.

Right now we don't have a table in our dining room so we set up some card tables restaurant style for eating.  The centerpieces were some numbered storage boxes I had on hand that we filled with blocks and balloons.  A fun hand-me-down foam S.S. play mat helped define the kid's table.  Napkins, plates, and utensils were all repeats from last year's sunshine shindig.  It just so happens that Bert, Ernie, Big Bird and Zoey share those sunshiney colors.  I truly thought about adding noses and eyes to the paper goods (or at least the cups) but decided against it for sanity reasons.  Turns out they weren't missed.

After finding a killer coupon for half off a Publix decorated cake, plus another coupon for $4 off on top of that, I decided that I would forgo the hassle of making my own cake and just make some decorations for the pre-made one.  That's where the cake pops came in!  I worked on them Saturday and got enough done to decorate the cake and stand as a dessert on their own too.  Though time consuming, they were super easy to recreate and all the kids loved them!

The rest of the food was easy, peasy, lemon squeezy (have you heard this phrase?  It's all the rage with first, second, and third graders nowadays).  We had pulled pork and chicken barbecue sandwiches, potato salad, and marinated salad (a Roach staple at all get togethers) for the main fare.  Then some extra snacks like Texas caviar and chips, Scrabble Cheezits (the ones with letters on them), yummy shortbread letter cookies (that I found at the Dollar Tree), a trash can o' sour gummy worms (a la Oscar's pal Slimy), a goldfish bowl full of Dorothies (Elmo's pet goldfish), and my favorite...fruit and veggie trays in the form of Grover and Elmo respectively. 

Grover was made of blueberries with a raisin and grape mouth, tomato nose, and mushroom with raisin eyes.  Kara scanned the idea from a book (along with a cute as can be Ernie and Bert that I decided not to tackle) and sent it to me.  Yay.

Elmo was a platter of cherry tomatoes with an oval of carrots for a nose, some colossal black olives for a mouth (the can said colossal and they were indeed!) and two applesauce cups of veggie dip and some olive slices for eyes.  I thought I came up with this on my own but have since found multiple versions of this very same thing on Pinterest.  Who knew that people before me had also decided Elmo would look great as a veggie tray?

Ryan stood over me as I poured the marinated pea salad into a bowl and said, "hey, if you put eyes on that it'd look like Oscar".  Brilliant!  So I got out two more mushrooms and olive slices and arranged them as eyes, cut up some more olives and made them into a mouth, happened to have a red pepper on hand that I cut into a tongue, and had just enough whole green pepper left to slice up two menacing eyebrows (which in hindsight should have totally overlapped the mushrooms).  And there was Oscar staring right back at me.  Thanks, Ryan.  I like how you think.

As far as entertainment, the children were quite content playing together in the playroom.  Sammy set up a judges bench in the book nook, complete with a peg-hammer gavel, and commenced to sentencing.  Maggi was especially fond of the grocery cart.  And the adults enjoyed looking through Molly's shutterfly book collections of past memories.

After dinner I made paper bag puppets with the kids and then everyone gathered in the "living room" (dubbed the "messy room" by the Scardino kids because of the stacks of boxes:) for an impromptu shower curtain puppet show given by Ryan and me.  It wasn't supposed to be impromptu but we ran out of time for planning the stellar show that played in my head. Ha ha.  Kermit emceed and led a rousing sing-a-long of the Sesame Street theme song.  (You know..."sunny days, sweepin' the clouds away, on my way to where the air is sweet, can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street...etc.)  And then the barnyard puppets carried on with some punny animal jokes.  The kids loved it.  Molly loved it.

Molly got some much needed help opening her gifts and was thrilled with their contents.  She's been happily busy with them ever since and we're never short of things to do when we walk in the door from school for sure!

Oh, and since we didn't have Ellen along to take pictures this year, Uncle Mark graciously filled in:

She loved the birthday song and bent waaaay down to blow out her two candles on the first try.  She seemed totally happy with her choice of birthday cake and strawberry ice cream!

We ended the night with a game of Oscar's Trash Toss which consisted of throwing trash into Oscar's can from various points.  This entertained 8 year olds and 2 year olds alike.

The goody buckets were galvanized flower pots that I hoped would read as trash cans.  They were filled with letter fruit snacks, a cellophane bag of more "Slimy"s (gummy worms), a rubber ducky squirter and bubbles (from Ernie's bathtime), a sheet of S.S. stickers and a package of "the letter of the day night" candy, M&Ms.  Instead of all the candy, Maggi's trash can had an applesauce pouch, yogurt covered raisins and some S.S. triangular crayons.  All the kids also took home a S.S. Happy Birthday coloring book. (The Target dollar bins featured S.S. not too long ago!)  Molly passed out more M&M's to the rest of her adult guests at the end of the night.

Ryan and I had a great time putting everything together and Molly's excitement made it all worthwhile of course.  This year's birthday included a few firsts too.  First birthday party in the new house, first birthday with the new legs, first birthday with real opinions:).  We're so proud of Molly and all she's overcome in this past second year of life (you do realize September 1st marked the start of her 2nd birthday but 3rd year of life.  Whoah!  This also means I'm about to have my 29th birthday but start my THIRTIETH year of life.  What?!?!)  We praise and thank God and give Him the glory for all He has done this year and we're looking forward to what the next will bring for sure!