Project Life: July 2014 Birthday Celebrations

July is birthday central around here!  We have four birthdays in our family and one of my best friend's is in July too.  That means a lot of events to cover, too many pictures, and lots of Project Life spreads!  Actually, I'd rather have too many photos than not enough.  Each one really does help jog my memory and remind me of the little moments from the day.

Birthday festivities began with my husband's birthday, shown in July Part 1, and continue with my daughter's 8th.  She had a low key day but we still made it special.  She also had a Not Quite a Sleepover party with several of her friends, but I'm not sharing those pages because I'd had to cover the faces of most of her friends.  She had plenty of eighth birthday fun!

When we celebrated all the July birthdays as a family, one of the big moments was our three year old getting his first big boy bike.  He's in love with it, especially because it's Cars themed.  He does really well on it, in fact, just a week ago on the first warmish day he climbed on and was able to ride it all by himself most of the way down the street.  A special gift like this, deserved it's own page!

Since the dates of my kids' birthdays are just a week apart, we have been having a combined family celebration and plan to do so for as long as we can get away with it.  My daughter doesn't object to the theme being more of my son's choice because she has her own friend party too.

Between the bike half and a party details page, is an insert with both of the kids' sign in pages.  Just my daughter's is shown above.  We have each of the guest sign and write a message on it and it serves as a nice way to record who was there and preserve the handwriting of various family members as well.  I blurred out some details for privacy, but each sign in includes each child's name and age, plus the year.

The other half spread show some detail photos.  My son was, is all about John Deere everything.  When we realized we could buy the cutest cake all decorated and with a mini tractor on it, my daughter said we had to go with that!  We used pink and green as our main colors so she was still happy that it was a little girly.

There are lots of cool ideas on Pinterest to help theme out your party!  This pin helped me figure out how to decorate the tables.  I got the idea for the cute food names like hay bales for rice krispy treats and spare tires for chocolate covered donuts, from here.  I edited this free printable and also made my own for my daughter to make banners.  Some more signs I made using clip art found online, got popped into my favorite Ikea Tolsby frames and I kept a few to add in one of the pockets.

This full spread has more favorite pictures from the party, mostly group photos and I made sure everyone there was shown at least once.  One of my goals is to not be a letter sticker horder, so I used lots spell out the sur names of our family and friends on various photos, blurred for online sharing.  Details were added to the 4X6 after photographing.  The free printable food sign I included in a pocket are from here.

This next page and insert focuses on my daughter.  I let her look through the photos I took that day and select which ones she wanted to include.

As is always the case, it seems once you have kids, Brad's birthday was regulated to the end of the day, but I did include a few.  My mom's birthday was technically part of the day too, but we had already gone to the beach for hers earlier so I just included her throughout the birthday spreads instead of dedicating one to her.

After the insert is a page about my son and the reason why everything was yellow and green!  I made the B shirt for him, and even though the sewing is wonky I'm pretty proud of it.  It took several trips all around town to find the right combination of fabric and colored shirt.

That's the end to our extended family and friends celebration!

But the birthdays weren't quite over yet!  On my son's actual third birthday my husband took the day off and we went to one of the little guy's favorite places.  Car, farm equipment, trains...under one roof?  Yep, he's all in!

I ended up with a lot of photos from the aviation exhibit so I included part of the map on this spread and then just numbered each photo to make journaling a bit easier.

On the back half of the insert and the following Design A page protector I put my favorite pictures from gift opening back at our house.  And now...family summer birthdays are done, at least until next year!

On the birthday pages, I used a lot the Birthday Sn@p collection by Simple Stories: 4X6, 3X4, Stickers, and Insta Squares.   It's officially retired but you can still find pieces of at the craft stores, like Michaels, Joann's, and Hobby Lobby.  I've seen it at all three, and recently so if you can probably still pick up pieces if you like the bright colors and it's gender neutral flexibility.