Ethan's "Cars 2" Fourth Birthday Party

When I asked Ethan what he wanted for his birthday party this year, his response was the same as last year...Cars!! Well, more specifically, he wanted Tow Mater, and later decided he wanted Lightning McQueen mixed in there, too. So, I started designing his invites with this in mind. Last year, I made pit passes for the invitees (just family, since we had the party at the Great Wolf Lodge in Ohio), so I wanted to do something different this year, yet still race-themed. So, I decided to make tickets to the "race," aka his party. :)

    

I was happy with how they turned out and most importantly, Ethan thought they were really cool. :) All items you see here are available for customization and purchase through my business page, seeley LANE design, or Etsy shop. See bottom of the post for details!

I sent the tickets to each of the children invited to the party, and decided to also include a letter for the parents with more details.

After I got that far, I struggled to find motivation to get the rest of the party planned, due to a combination of pregnancy, hubby being out of town, and well, just the fact that I unfortunately procrastinate everything. So, the day before the party, I finally got to work designing and printing and getting everything ready for Saturday's party! Here's a summary of what I came up with for the big day.

To decorate the house, we bought a 5-pack of Cars 2 birthday balloons at the local party supply store and I made a custom banner that read "Happy 4th Birthday Ethan!" using checkered flags. Here's an example of the flags, close-up.

I also made tags to label the food items that we served at the party. I have these, in addition to blank tags (with characters), available.

My favorite was Francesco's Caprese skewers, because of the cute little checkered flags that we pasted onto toothpicks to hold them together. Adorable. :)

I also made custom water labels, like I did for Noah's Very Hungry Caterpillar party last summer.

I purchased a small favor for each of the kids to take home from the party - a Cars 2 cup filled with a Cars 2 fruit pouch, with a thank-you note for coming.

Then, finally, there was the cake. This consumed most of my Friday night and Saturday afternoon between baking three batches of my favorite vanilla sheet cake (in order to make 3-9" layers and 2-6" layers), then decorating it to look like a cake I found on Pinterest, that Ethan picked as his favorite! The cake has a mix of Lightning McQueen eyes with a Tow Mater mouth. Ethan thought it was absolutely hilarious every time he saw it on my laptop screen, and really wanted me to make one for him. The original was super awesome, done in fondant, of course, which helps tremendously, but I didn't think mine was too bad. Ethan loved it, and that was really all that I cared about when all was said and done! :) I found the cute cake topper and candles at Walmart. The candles have tires on the bottom - love it! For my frosting, I made a batch of faux fondant icing. After you ice the cake, you can let it set, then go back in with a smooth napkin or paper towel and rub it to create a smoother looking finish to the icing. It has worked fairly well for me in the past, but I think the humidity that day (it was snowing, in March!!) was messing with my icing a bit. :( So, it wasn't perfect, but not bad.

And here are some pics of the birthday boy!! :)

Happy 4th Birthday to my big boy!