Bug Party!

Last month a crazy thing happened: our sweet little baby turned 3!

I seriously don't know where the time went (especially since the last time I blogged she was only 3 months old - my bad).  In the weeks leading up to her birthday I started asking her what she wanted as a theme for her birthday.  No princesses for this one - she wanted bugs!  So bugs it was  :)

We had a lot of fun with the decorations and food.  I made her a Happy Birthday banner of leaves and bugs (side note:  I love my Cricut!).  The girls and I decorated balloons to look like bugs and put them up on the walls all over the house.

I decided to serve a full on meal because there were just too many fun bug foods that I came up with!  Here are some of the fun foods we had:

And, of course, we had to have cake!  I decided to make these cute (and easy) ladybug cupcakes.  The M&M ladybugs were definitely Ella's favorite part!  She begged at least 5 ladybugs off of everyone else's cupcakes.

We decided to go on a bug scavenger hunt.  Since we had a family party with lots of adults and a few kids, we split up into teams with one child and 2-3 adults per team.  I hid plastic bugs around the yard (with numbers on the bottom corresponding to prizes), and each of the kids got a little "bug box" with bug grabbers and a little net (thanks Dollar Tree!) to put all of the bugs they found.  In addition, each team got a paper with a list of real bugs to find and I had prizes for the team that found the most.  The kids had lots of fun hunting for bugs, although since it was evening there weren't as many bugs to be found as I had expected.  It was a good thing I'd hidden plastic ones so there was enough excitement!

Aubrey loved opening her presents!  She is definitely a very loved little girl!

We're so glad so many family members were able to celebrate Aubrey's special day with us!