Shepard's Birthday Party!

Today was Shepard's birthday party! I'm so glad we unknowingly didn't do it last weekend when he turned out to be so sick. We found out on Thursday that he actually has a really bad double ear infection, but after a couple days of antibiotics he was back to his super smiley and fun self for his party today!

We had a tractor themed party. I made tacos for the main food and then my mother-in-law made this awesome vegetable "field" and my mom brought tons of delicious fruit. As usual, we had WAY more food than we needed. It was all so good, though!!

Caden decided to help make the punch by sneaking fingerfuls of sherbet.

I was really excited to find these chocolate rocks and green seeds for party favors. I forgot to actually tell people to bring them home, though, so now we have a huge bag filled with the extras. :)

Happy kid!

Taking a reading break.

The present pile!

Shepard shows excitement over everything, which is why it's so fun to watch him all the time. He was thrilled over his first few pieces of tissue paper!

Tractor! (And both cats managing to sneak into the photo.)

He doesn't even know what this is, but he's pretty excited about it!

Getting some help from Liz.

He even holds up all the clothes he gets. Later he held up a new pajama shirt, pronounced it too big, and threw it across the room. Always, so funny. :)

Cards that make music are apparently the greatest thing on earth to a two year old.

Very excited about a trailer to attach to his new tractor!

He loved his new Donkey Kong.

Baby Ethan and his beautiful eyes!

We all had some good laughs over this. :)

Shepard was pretty nervous, but after Caden and Donkey Kong had a turn, Shepard loved jumping on his new Rody Horse!

Caden definitely provided Ethan with some fantastic entertainment!

Finally time for cake!

I had a really hard time coming up with a cake idea for this theme. It seems like with all of Caden's birthday parties I know exactly what I want to do, but Shepard so far is proving to be quite difficult. I wanted to try and do something tastier (versus visual). I'm not a huge cake person (maker or eater), so I wanted to challenge myself a bit. I ended up combining old fashioned chocolate cake, peanut butter cake, toasted marshmallow frosting, and chocolate malt frosting all together to get this. And then because I didn't want to make a third batch of chocolate malt frosting, I threw together a vanilla buttercream for the smaller cake. I was very excited about how the layers turned out. Not perfect, but more elaborate than I've ever done before!

I think he's getting tired.

Layers in the bigger cake. This chocolate frosting was sooo good. I pretty much ate an entire bowl of it last night while I was making it.

The big "rocks" around the cake are actually chocolate boulders. Grandma tasted one - and Shepard's expression in this is hilarious!

The chocolate frosting had an entire container of black gel food coloring in it so it turned everyone's teeth black. I think this picture is sweet, though. Caden looks so old! Like a ten year old or something. My baby is growing up.

Not an attractive picture, but still funny. It was a perfect birthday party! Thanks to everyone that helped out and came and made it such a special day for our beautiful little boy!