Collin was born on December 3 and he turned 3, which means this was his golden birthday! I wanted to incorporate some gold without it looking too girly, so I used gold where I could – cake, cookies, and a couple of other little things.

This was Collin’s first birthday party where we invited his friends, so we weren’t sure how he would react to singing Happy Birthday. To our surprise, he loved it and smiled the whole time everyone was singing!

THEME

After getting home from our Disney World Trip, I realized just how much Collin loved Lightning McQueen. And I was reminded every time he wanted to watch all three of the Cars movies. It was obvious that we would be doing a Cars birthday party for him.

Camryn loves planning almost as much as I do. When we talked about Halloween costumes earlier in the year, Camryn asked if we could dress up as the Cars characters. I knew then that I would be building and making our Halloween costumes. I also knew it would be worth it because we could reuse them for Collin’s birthday party.

DECORATIONS

One of the downsides to planning a “simple” birthday party months in advance is you have too much time to think about all the things. I ended up making TWENTY cars. Whoops! We had to have the four of ours, then I made one for Weston’s mom since she would be helping us at Halloween, then I made two for my parents for the party. The food table obviously had to be Mack. We thought it would be cute to have cars for all of Collin’s friends to wear at the party too. I built them and Camryn and Collin painted most of it. It was a good activity for them to do in the summer!

All the tiny cars made me want to paint a racetrack on the garage floor. I bought black and white washable paint and painted it the day before the party. You can’t really tell in the photos, but the black paint ended up looking very green. None of the kids wanted to play on the racetrack, but they did have fun playing on the playground.

Since I was in the painting mood, I also painted the banner and the Collin sign. It was freezing when I was decorating, which affected the adhesives and made it difficult to hang the Collin sign. It was hanging by a prayer and one strong piece of Gaffer tape that decided to stick!

FOOD

Our kids pretty much expect to have themed cookies and a cake at their birthday parties now. With it being an early morning party, we added goldfish so that it wasn’t ALL sugar. I separated the red, yellow, and green goldfish and arranged them to look like a stoplight from above.

Mrs. Phyllis made Collin’s cake and it was perfect, as usual! She always makes our cakes, but it was a little more special this year since she is also Collin’s Sunday School teacher.

It was a sweet party and Collin had so much fun celebrating with his friends and family. Thank you to everyone who made our boy feel special!