Eric Turns 2!!

Despite not having a lot of time after the cruise for planning Eric's birthday party, a little pre-planning before the cruise helped me to pull it off much better than I imagined.  Because of Eric's obsession with "guau guau's," I knew he had to have a birthday party filled with them.  So, I surfed Pinterest looking for ideas for the perfect puppy party.

First, I looked for ideas for his cake.  I wanted to make sure that I had the fondant prepared and wanted to pre-sculpt any fondant figurines that I could make ahead of time.   I didn't really have an idea of how exactly I wanted the cake to look, but I decided that I wanted it to be a simple two-tiered cake as a base, that would somehow be decorated with fondant dogs.  Luckily, there were lots of ideas on how to sculpt dogs on youtube, and I got some ideas of how to make some easy fondant dogs, and made a lot of them before leaving for the cruise.

After seeing other parties online, I decided that I also would need to work on some decorations for the party, so I looked for some cute dog napkins online.  Unfortunately, although I found some really cute ones available in the U.S., it would have been way too expensive to have them shipped to me.  So, I decided that I would stamp my own.  

stamped paper napkins

I couldn't find any cute, inexpensive, dog-related stamps that would be small enough to work for stamping the napkins, though, so I ended up crafting my own from cheap rubber erasers.  It was easier and worked out much better than I could have imagined.  I tried stamping them with rubber stamp ink, but none of the colors I had showed up well on the napkins, so I stamped them with white acrylic ink instead.

Adult goodie bag contents

Maite came over one weekend to help me work on getting things ready for the party.  So, while I was working on stamping napkins, Maite helped me decorate some goody bags for the kids.  I ordered some little paper bags online since here they are not a common item that one can find in the supermarket.  To decorate them, I made another couple of homemade stamps, one of Eric's name and one of a paw print, this time using foam sheets glued onto an old cd case top.  Since the top was transparent, it was easy to line up the stamp to paint it in just the right place.

Originally the goody bags were going to be just for the kids, but I ended up making something for the women who attended the party too.  At first, when I didn't find any napkins I liked, I had toyed with the idea of making some cute cloth napkins that would also serve as a souvenir of the party.  I bought an inexpensive striped jersey fitted sheet to use as the fabric for those napkins, making them simply using a serger border, and I decorated them with Eric's name.  I felt bad about using them as napkins at the party, though, and so I decided to just give them out at the party instead when I came up with the idea of stamping the paper napkins.

After making those, I had leftover fabric, and decided to use it to make a cute pennant banner that said "Feliz Cumpleaños Eric."  In order to have a variety of colors in the banner, I recycled some fabric from old t-shirts for some of the banners. It ended up being pretty cute, if I do say so myself.

After all of that, I had some cute goody bags, but didn't have much to put into them.  So, I decided I would be making some dog biscuits out of sugar cookie dough.  I was worried about making them too far ahead of time, though, so instead of making the cookies ahead of time, I made the dough and froze it.   

There wasn't much more that I could do ahead of time except for decorating the dog bowls that I wanted to use as food receptacles.  I looked for cute ideas for the party, and liked the idea of having a puppy adoption station, but I couldn't find any cute, inexpensive puppies that I could buy for the kids.  The people in the puppy parties on Pinterest had been lucky enough to find cute stuffed dogs in local dollar stores.  Here, though, dollar stores just don't exist.  There were some 100 pesetas stores years ago, but even those never had everything for 100 pesetas.  

Nowadays, people shop at the "chinos" which are the inexpensive, find-anything stores.  Even after visiting many of those, though, I couldn't find any type of dog that I liked for the kids.  I was open to finding little dog keychains or stuffed animals or even some sort of figurine, but I just wasn't having any luck.

Adopt a dog

After the cruise, after having given up on the whole idea, I found a new chino that I didn't know about before.  I decided to check it out just for fun, and was pleasantly surprised to find that they had some perfect dog stuffed animals available for a reasonable price (No, not a dollar, but they didn't break the budget either).  I wasn't going to need that many anyway, so I decided to buy them.  The nice thing about them was that they all had a cute cloth tag hanging from the collar, which would be perfect for the kids to decorate with the name of their new puppy.

So, I made some cute adoption certificates.  I had found a cute download freebie for the certificates, but they, of course, were in the wrong language, so I translated them and made a few changes.  I ended up using the same border from the certificates to make up some cute labels for my sugar cookie doggie treats.

Rainbow cake with swiss buttercream frosting

The last few days before the party, I spent time looking for doggy activities, and worked on making a pin the tail on the doggy game, amongst other things.  When it came time for the party, though, that ended up being wasted time.  Having both adults and kids at the party made it impossible to focus on everybody while trying to play activities.  The kids kept busy playing by themselves, though, and we didn't end up playing any of the games, but I don't feel like the party was lacking because of it either.  The kids did enjoy adopting their dogs, though, and the older kids had fun filling out the adoption certificates.  It turns out that after the party, a lot of the kids were very happy with their souvenir from the party, some of them wanting to bring their new puppies everywhere with them.

Eric's small cake for the Escoleta

The cake ended up being a bit of a challenge for me.  I made a little mini cake for the party at the Escoleta, and it turned out pretty cute.  It was a rainbow cake on the inside, which is what I made for the base of the party cake too.  The tiny cake for the school ended up being easy to decorate because there was only one level with a lot of space on top for placing the fondant dogs and the candle.    

"mommy, guau-guau!!"

When making the bigger cake for his party at home, though, I didn't have a lot of space for placing the dogs.  I could put a few on the very top, but none would fit on the ledge of the lower cake that surrounded the top layer.  So, I had an idea to move the upper cake a bit to the side to make room for them.

In theory, it was a really great idea, but it practice it was much more difficult than I had originally imagined.  You see, the cakes were staked together with a wooden skewer, and the lower level also had supports which were set directly in the center of the cake.  So, when I was moving the cake, I had a problem with the center stake, and I caught it on something, probably the straw around one of the lower supports, making my upper level cake, complete with fondant dogs and all, flip over and fall on top of the lower cake, smashing both of them and breaking the ears off of most of the fondant dogs!!

Of course I freaked out!  Once I calmed down a bit, though, I realized that things could have been a lot worse.  The upper cake fell directly on top of the lower cake and not on the floor or even the countertop.  So, I was able to still use it if I could make it presentable again.  Being such a dense chocolate cake, the upper layer didn't really become too deformed.  The lower layer also held itself up pretty well, but one of the edges was smashed in beyond being able to push it back into shape perfectly where one of the fondant dogs had gotten between the two cakes during the fall.  Luckily, the dogs, being pretty hard after drying while we were gone on our cruise, held up pretty well and weren't as damaged as they could have been.  A few were lacking ears, though, and I had to replace those.

I decided that despite a few noticeable flaws, that the cake was still salvageable.  I needed a plan for covering up some of the more noticeable defects, though, and I decided upon making the dogs fondant blankets that would drape over the problem areas.  In the end, the cake turned out better because of the error because the blankets added some needed color and interest to the finished cake.  I also was able to strategically place the fondant bones, dog paws and Eric's name to cover other little flaws.  So, by the time I was done, you really would have had to know what had happened to be able to, well, know what had happened.  In the end I was happy with it overall.

The party at school was fun.  It was just a short little party at the usual breakfast/snack time.  The kids gather around and sing to the birthday boy or girl.  They sing "Happy Birthday" in Castellano, Valenciano and English.  They also sang another birthday song, which can be seen in my short video of Eric blowing out his candles.

At first he didn't really catch on to the whole blowing out the candles routine, but once he figured it out, it was hard to get him to stop.  He kept asking for more and more and more.  So, we had to keep lighting the candles and let him blow them out again and again and again.  Here's a short video showing how he liked blowing out the candles at both parties.  You can see that the other kids were trying to keep him from blowing out the candles until the end of the song.

Last year Eric's birthday party at home basically only consisted of family and a few close friends.  The only other kid who came was Eric's cousin Noa.  He's now getting to the age that he is more aware of what is going on, though.  So, in order to have a few kids for Eric to play with at the party, we invited the girls who work at the Escoleta and their little girls.  Maite also brought a few kids from her neighborhood.  

On the day of the party, Maite came early to help get things together.  She helped me fix the goodie bags and made little dog bone shaped sandwiches for the kids.  Mauri helped me put my pennant banner up and set up the tables.  He also put out the artificial grass and some of Eric's toys for the kids to play on.  

We had a nice mix of friends, family and kids at the party.  It was better that way, but also made it impossible to spend time with everybody.   It also distracted me to the point of forgetting to set up the games I had prepared for the kids.  Some people had to leave early, so I tried to spend more time with them at first, but then others also had to leave and I felt like I hadn't paid any attention to them.  I guess that's just how these sorts of parties end up being, though.

We brought out the cake pretty early on so that everybody could see it and have a piece before leaving, but I think that actually ended up triggering more people to leave early.  In any case, it was fun.  The kids had a hard time believing that the dogs on the cake were edible, and they were pulling off the dogs ears, legs and heads to get a taste.  I quickly grabbed a few of the figurines to save as a little souvenir of the party.

So, there were a few little issues, but overall the party went well and was a lot of fun.  We were so busy throughout, that we didn't fill out the puppy adoption certificates until some of the kids had already left with their dogs and empty certificates. The kids that were still there had fun with it, though.  I also realized that we hadn't even bothered to open Eric's presents, so we did that at the very end.

Eric already has lots of clothes from our last trip to the U.S., and has lots of toys.  So, we asked for some Blue Ray DVD movies, if possible with dogs.  Unfortunately, there aren't many DVD's available around here.  So, there weren't any dog movies available on Blue Ray, but we did get the two Cars movies, the new Muppet movie and Up.  We've since seen all of them.  Just days after the party, Eric became obsessed with the Cars movies, and would constantly beg me for "coches, coches."  Do I see a possible theme for next year's party?