I blinked and my baby turned THREE! I can't believe I have such a big kid. Jone has been so obsessed with Cars and decided he wanted a Car's birthday party. One of the bitter-sweet things about Jonesy growing up is that he is forming his own opinion on things like what to wear and what shows to watch. I wanted his party to be "cute" but not too kitschy. (#artistproblems) Plus I'm a big fan of reusing party decor year after year and can't exactly do that when they all have Lightning McQueen all over them. So we settled on a "race car party." I looked online for cute ideas for invites and found a couple "Pit Pass" tickets that I liked. Instead of just grabbing one off of Etsy I used google for inspiration and made my own in photoshop. (This was one of the few things that had Lightning McQueen on it.) I found a blank "Cars Logo" png file online and then looked for a "Cars-esque" font for "Jones." The barcode I got off a free barcode generator. It's actually one of my favorite details. The code is actually what Jones' birthday this year looks like as a barcode. When it came time to decorate the house I used all the colorful bunting that I had. I did run out to Zurcher's to buy some checkered flag bunting and toothpick flags for the cake and I borrowed a "sponsor" flag from my mom, but I already had everything else!

     I'm no baker, and it shows. I made Jones' cake to hopefully resemble a race track. Jones has a ton of these mini Cars that were the perfect size. In my head the cake was supposed to look a lot better than it does. I had to make a lot of game time decisions when my back started to give out while decorating. Did I mention I'm 9 months pregnant? But in the end (and a lot of frosting later) it turned out decent. Especially in the eyes of a three year old. The finishing touch was making the finish line banner for the cake. I just colored a checkered pattern onto some paper and taped it to a cut-in-half shish kebab and stuck that sucker in the cake. Since I wanted the party to be short and sweet, we only did cake and ice cream. While we waited for everyone to get to the house I had a race track set up in the kitchen where everyone could race with their take home cars I bought. The party was a success and Jones loved having all the decorations up. (So much so that he made me keep them up for a few extra days!)