a lovely living

This past Saturday was spent celebrating our children’s birthdays with our families. We hosted the party in our building’s lounge which is quite a handy place to be able to utilize. It wasn’t huge or overboard, but it was a great afternoon and most importantly the kids had a blast! Today I’m sharing some shots I captured and I’ll have a few other detailed posts (ie outfit and food) coming up. This party gave me some great material!

Here’s my handsome (just about) 5 year old ready for the party to start. You can take note of his outfit now opposed to later on.

And here’s little Miss all dolled up.

I didn’t technically have a theme, but Target made decorating pretty easy.

Most importantly, the food. I played around with some new recipes (the cake, sandwiches and couscous salad) and added a trusted spinach/artichoke dip. Everything turned out better than expected and I’ll be sharing a more detailed post on the lemon/blueberry cake as well as the pressed Italian sandwiches (omg) soon. I didn’t get to document the tomato, bacon and spinach couscous salad but you can find the recipe here, it was delicious, and the spinach artichoke recipe can be found here.

Madelyn reading one of her gifts intently.

And then there are the gifts that make me cringe but will end up being worn to death….this would be thanks to my sister. She knew exactly what she was doing ;)

As if the shirt wasn’t bad enough, his second most favorite gift was a whoopee cushion! It certainly had everyone laughing uncontrollably!

This is my beautiful sister, Sarah. Outside of certain mannerisms, we look nothing alike. Some people try to disagree, but I think they’re lying ;) This girl is a huge help to our family, especially since we’ve moved closer to home. It’s a blessing to have her willing to help out with whatever is needed whenever we need it. Even if she does give my son ugly t-shirts!

And this would be the best family shot we could get. Unless I wanted a screaming 2 yo, I was going to have to deal with the floaties. So be it. Happy Birthday to two crazy, amazing, beautiful children. I love you!!

I’m sure many of you have heard of Shutterfly, who also happens to run Tinyprints, a favorite site of mine for various types of stationary. Well, they now have a new addition called Treat which is their new greeting card website which caters to specialized versions of personal greeting cards. I wanted to give you an idea of how their cards could be used to create a personalized thank you for an event such as this. Check it out:

I love the simplicity of their site and know our guests would appreciate the personalization as well! Check them out the next time you find yourself searching for that perfect card!

xo,

Marisa