Well hello there! Its been a little bit since I’ve posted and I have to say thank you to Jenna for holding down the fort on the fun content! I promise I haven’t just been sitting over here eating bon bons and goofing off. Since my last post, our kiddo has started preschool (co-op so i get to work in his class) and managed to turn 3 years old, mix that in with some visits, travel, and lots of house projects and yup, March pretty much was over in the blink of an eye. Wes is now attending preschool in the mornings two days a week and we officially have a 3 year old mini human living in our home!
There was really no question about what Wesley’s Birthday theme would be this year. Ever since the world series last fall he has increasingly fallen more in love with baseball! It is the sweetest thing to watch him play catch with his dad in the back yard.
Now, when I say he has fallen in love with baseball I feel like it deserves a bit of clarification. He started when playing catch at about 2 and a half, and his dad bought him his first glove because Wes wanted to wear the big gloves but couldn’t raise his arm to catch the ball. For Christmas he asked Santa for a baseball helmet with a mask in “writing” as well as every time he saw a Santa in person all season! The first thing he wants to do when he wakes up is play catch, well actually all he ever wants to do is play catch, and we usually spend the last hours of daylight outside playing catch then putting his baseball gear to sleep! He calls all his button down shirts Jerseys and won’t leave the house unless he has his favorite one on. His favourite song is take me out to the ball game, and we sing it about 6 times every day. And his favorite movie oscillates between “Rookie of the Year” and “The Sandlot”, both of which he has watched with my husband, on their Saturday morning “cartoons” ritual, so that i can sleep in a bit. So yeah, this kid LOVES baseball!
Research
So off to Pinterest I went in search of fun ideas for how to make a 3 year olds baseball dreams come true, and low and behold Pinterest did not disappoint! You can check out the inspiration pin board I made here. This is the list of ntoes I made after my first round of research:
- Peanuts – You can find these are the grocery store in large bags 🙂
- Cracker Jack – Found them on amazon! Was not easy to find in the store in boxes!
- Hot Dogs & Hamburgers + something healthy ish?
- Ballpark Fruit or veggie platter
- Red Vines
- Baby Ruth candy bars – Cheaper to buy them at the grocery store, trust me!!
- Baseballs, Bats, Gloves for Decor
- Red, White, and Blue colors
With my vision brewing I let my fingers walk right over to Amazon where I found a small assortment of baseball themed items to help make the party more festive!
I also knew I wanted to get Wes a Custom Baseball jersey for his big day. I found a couple of cute options and ended up ordering 2 since I figured he would cycle through them pretty quickly. They have both gotten completely filthy and been washed twice in the week and half since he got them.
Jersey #2 – Etsy (custom Name) – We had this one say Wesley on the back and Slugger on the front 🙂
Decor:
Some times with party planning it is hard for me to really get in the groove until the 11th hour, in this case it was Wednesday night before our Saturday party and I had this idea that maybe Wesley should have a scoreboard for his field! My mom was here visiting and i’m pretty sure she sthough i had lost my mind, but she is always game for a project so we started painting cardboard! Wesley really enjoyed helping with this part.
As far as the other decor goes i had a lot of good stuff on hand, and between the signs and few balloons and banner that i bought i didn’t really have to spend all that much money on decorations.
Things I had:
- Baseball Gloves new and vintage
- Used Baseballs courtesy of my husbands old baseball gear bag
- 4th of July Bunting
- Crates from Joann’s (crying sad tears for our fallen crafting haven) Michaels has them too…
Things I made:
- Score Board: using a large piece of Card Board box, green paint, masking tape, and Printed/cut out letters 🙂 I found some free fonts which you can find On DaFont.com , I used Varsity for the score board letters. They have a great baseball Font called Brannboll that i referenced for my chalk sign and will totally use for future baseball related stuff. Reference photo for sign design
- The “Wesley Field Home of the Morton’s” sign was free handed and loosely based on Chicago’s Wrigley Stadium Sign, boy do I love an art deco marquee!!
- The concessions Stand Sign: Free hand again here, just some good old cardboard and paint!
- Baseballs: I made a few extra large baseballs using white cardstock a salad plate and a red sharpie, so easy, and added lots of extra punch to my bunting on the fence and the gifts table!
- Little Pennant Flags and Bunting: I didn’t design these, I have subscriptions to some stock photo/vector digital download sights so i won’t link those here because you would need the subscription to buy them, but i found almost the exact same one for sale as a digital download on etsy. It was an easy print and cut out project, and you can resize them for multiple purposes. all you need is some cardstock, hole punch, skewers or chop sticks, hot clue and string (to make a banner and little flags that is)
Things I bought:
- Balloons in Red white and blue with Baseball balloons, I also looked at this balloon arch, but chickened out…40 balloons was enough for me
- Happy Birthday Banner
- The Squeezy balls that we bought for favors worked great as decor as well
- Baseball Wrapping paper
BONUS! Ryan’s Mom happened to have an adorable popcorn machine that she inherited from an old job. She brought it and it made fresh buttery popcorn for the whole party!
Concessions!
We kept the menu true to ball park form with Hot dogs and hamburgers, complete with all the fixings, as well as a “Jen Salad” and an easy Ramen Salad, I also attempted to make a “Ball field” out of the fruit platter…I think you can see it if you know what you are looking for :P.
Ramen Salad Recipe HERE
Jen Salad recipe: I’m kind of obsessed with this so every spring it makes another appearance on my roster. Its tasty, light, refreshing, and pretty easy. Oh and i always make it with Bulgar…it just feels a bit heartier than quinoa.
For Beverages I always like to make a large batch of White and Red Sangrias for big parties, I usually add a little extra juice to help water it down and make it more appropriate for a daytime adult beverage. Then we also had a small selection of Beers (love the Mango Cart one from Trader Joes) including non alcoholic, Waters, Sodas, Honest apple juice packs for the kids (love these because they have way less sugar, so if you are goin to do juice, its better than the regular brands)
White Sangria: (this is the base recipe, I usually double it for a big party)
- 1 Bottle White wine (3 buck chuck from trader joes does just fine!)
- .5 cup St Germain
- 2 cans Ginger ale
- Sliced Green Grapes, fresh Pineapple, Frozen Mango
“Ausie Splash” Sangria: This is a throw back copycat recipe to a drink they used to serve at CPK (California Pizza Kitchen) My aunt reverse engineered the recopied and it was a favorite, i think we even served it at my collage graduation party! Long story short I’m putting it here so that it is officially on the record! Oh and its called Ausie Splash because it originally called for a Yellow tail Shiraz, which is an Australian wine.
- 1 bottle Red wine ( Yellow tail Shiraz or the Charles Shaw Shiraz)
- .5 cup Coconut Rum (Malibu or Parrot bay work)
- .5 cup Mango Syrup (love this one form Monnin)
- 2 cups Lemonade (we used the organic one from Trader Joes, but minute maid will work)
- Frozen Mango plus optional Strawberries, Grapes, and or Lime slices (note if you think you will have left over skip the lime slices because it adds a bitter flavor to the sangria if it sits over night)
CAKE
We made vanilla and chocolate cupcakes using Jenna’s Mom’s (my Aunts’) Doctored Cake mix recipe, They both turned out delicious, and we had just enough batter left over from each to make Wesley his very own baseball cake. I have to say piping the seams on the little cupcakes was very time consuming and I might recommend just doing one really big cake if you don’t have the time, or your mom there to help 😛
Favors: We kept this pretty simple as we anticipated the kiddos to be pretty young.
- Squeezy baseballs – Amazon
- “score Board” mini Magna doodle board – Dollar Tree
- Bubbles or side walk chalk – Dollar Tree
- “All Star” stickers – Dollar Tree
- Motts Fruit Gummies
Festivities:
- Temporary Tattoos: I found this cute set on Amazon and it was a big hit with the slightly older kids!
- Baseball Coloring: There are SOOOO many free coloring pages on the internet, all i did was google “free baseball coloring pages” and then printed a bunch out, SOOO easy!
- Side walk chalk: Its Almost easter so the Dollar store had a bunch of little Easter egg looking chalk which i felt was close enough to baseball shape for toddlers 😛
- Lots of “Baseball“: We set out all of Ryan’s gloves, Wesley’s gloves and a boat load of wiffle balls (purchased to help keep up with with Wesley’s insatiable desire to hit off of the little tykes pitching machine.) Ryan put on his old Umpire uniform so he could call the game. Some of the older neighborhood kids even came and played catch with Wes for almost the entire party!
- Corn Hole: My mom bough us this stars and stripes themed one maybe 10 years ago, but we got new bags this year as the old ones didn’t quite hold up to a critter they met last summer.
Music:
We DJ’d a playlist which combined organ music from Dodger stadium (fitting as we now live near LA) mixed with some baseball theme classics like Centerfield. You can check out my playlist on Spotify to see what we found, and for ease we just put it on shuffle 😛
OH and I couldn’t help my self but at about 2 am the night before the party i couldn’t sleep and proceded to write him this Birthday song while I lay there. (feel free to change the name and details to fit your little slugger!)
(sung to the tune of Take me out to the ball game”)
Happ-y birthday to Wes-ly, Happ-y birthday to Wes,
Wesley loves baseball and monster trucks
He can play catch so much longer than us
so it’s Root Root Root for our big Boy
when he makes a wish it will be…
one
two
Three years for Wes,
On his Big Birth-Day!!!
Not even a little bit sorry about that one! 😀 And I felt awfully clever that I did it all on my own (no chat CPT assist here!)
finally here are some….
Gift ideas for your little Slugger:
Some of these we already had and some he received On his birthday, all have gotten lots and lots of play time!
- Kiddo Bat and t-ball set
- Wiffle Balls
- pitching machine
- Hanging T-Ball
- Water t-ball sprinkler
- Wesley’s glove and Catchers glove
- Wesley’s Helmet
- Jersey
- Rebounder Net
- Base Set
- Curious George Loves Baseball
- The Bernstein bears go out for the Team
- Baseball Counting Book
Let me know what you think of this party theme in the comments!