Domapalooza - Dominic's 2nd Birthday Party

Having a blast on his 2nd birthday!

One of my baby boys is no longer a baby anymore.  Dominic turned 2 last week (which he can tell you!).  The same week that he turned 2, he finally had the “language explosion” that we have been waiting on for so many months and is saying practically double the number of words that he said before.  It’s very exciting!  I’m still in shock that Dominic is actually 2 years old.  Since I became pregnant with Dominic, I had been getting emails from various baby/mom websites that give me weekly or monthly updates on how he is progressing and what benchmarks he should be reaching.  They had been referring to Dominic as my "baby" until he was one when they began using the term “your toddler,” but now they are calling him my “preschooler.”  It’s pretty jarring to see that in my inbox.  I still think of him as my baby after all!  
     

Happy Birthday!

Pizza!

Before Dominic’s actual birthday on the 16th, we had his party.  We decided on Catch Air as the “venue” after visiting several other bounce house/inflatable locations when I was pregnant with Blake.  Because I was so anxious about how Dominic would react to the transition of having Blake, I wanted to start planning his party early and make everything as perfect as possible. Catch Air seemed to have a bigger variety of activities for the range of kids we’d be inviting.  Plus it’s very clean in comparison to some of the others.  Dominic loves going to Catch Air and thanks to a Groupon we’ve been going a lot recently.  

So fun!

It's my brother's party and I'll cry if I want to!

The party ended up being a very large crowd as almost everyone we invited came (and even some who didn’t RSVP yes).  Between our high school and college friends, (former) work friends, 2 playgroups, neighbors, and Dominic's classmates, the invite list was a bit long. Brian and I just wanted to share Dominic’s special day with his friends and our friends, but I guess it makes sense considering Brian and I both were born and raised in the area and went to college not far away.  It did make for a crazy couple of hours especially with so many toddlers running around.  At the party, Dominic didn’t want to stop playing to eat his pizza and cake.  He scarfed down the pizza (his new favorite food) but as usual refused to eat the Elmo-Big Bird cake.  For whatever reason, he doesn’t like cake.  Elmo basically became the theme because Catch Air had a giant Elmo dance around for the kids. Dominic, who loves Elmo normally, was terrified of this human-size Elmo. I guess there's a big difference between the Elmo on TV and giant Elmo.

Elmo!

Elmo birthday cake

I used the occasion to try out my first Pinterest project.  I used to wonder what the heck Pinterest was and completely dismiss the site, but I’m becoming increasingly obsessed with it now.  There are so many ideas to use around the house to organize, clean, and mostly complete fun projects with and for Dominic and Blake.  I just wish it had been around when I was a teacher.  There are so many fun teaching ideas on there!  Anyway, my first Pinterest project was creating recylcled crayons as party favors, making them into each of the kids’ names.  It was a lot of work, but the project itself was pretty easy.  I used a razor blade to peal the crayon wrappers off the crayons, cut the crayons up, put them into an alphabet silicone mold, and melted them in the oven for 15 minutes.  Then I had to wait for them to cool before I could take the letters out and start the process again.  Since I only had one set of the alphabet but many of the letters were used more than once in different names, I ended up making over 30 batches, which was pretty time-consuming.  I never relized how many a’s and n’s were in people’s names.  I became a big fan of short names during this process. :)  I wanted to give the kids their crayon names along with a Sesame Street coloring book, but Party City didn’t have enough books, so I had to give a little pad instead. Hopefully, the kids liked those almost as well.  

going into the oven

Melted letters

Some of the letters (the solids but the multi-colored letters ended up being much cooler!)

Not impressed with Chick-fil-a...is this really my kid??

Fun with Daddy!

Slide!

On Dominic’s actual birthday, Brian stayed home from work, and the four of us returned to Catch Air since we didn’t get to play with Dominic as much as we would’ve liked at the party.  We had planned on going downtown to the Children's Museum but decided at the last minute that we didn’t want to venture down there in the rainy weather and traffic.  Dominic had a blast at Catch Air (of course). On our way home, we stopped by Chick-fil-a and picked up lunch for all of us except for Blake.  We ordered Dominic’s first real kids’ meal since it was a special occassion and lately he keeps trying to eat our Chick-fil-a.  However, when we gave him his own meal, Dominic didn’t seem to like his chicken nuggets or even the fries.  I don’t know if I should be proud or concerned by this phenomenon.  Since Dominic is such a picky [and strange] eater, we had spinach pizza for dinner and gave him Girl Scout Cookies for dessert instead of birthday cake.  Dominic at least loves pizza and cookies, so he was happy.  

Jumping!

Dominic loves the ball pit.

Unfortunately, Dominic came down with a bad cold on his birthday.  He ended up napping for 3 hours!  Between his long nap and going down late after such a big morning, he didn’t wake up till close to 5:00, leaving us no time to go swimming in the afternoon as we had planned.  Also, Brian had the same cold and wasn’t feel great either.  I think Dominic had a great 2nd birthday, and we all had fun celebrating the anniversary of one of the very best days of Brian's and my lives, and of course a highlight was having Brian home all day with us!  Happy 2nd Birthday to my precious boy, Dominic!!

My sweet 2 year old boy!