Mavry's 2nd Birthday Party

 

In the process of catching up with posts I realized Mavry's 2nd birthday was still waiting to be posted.  She turned two years old on February 6th! We celebrated with a pancake brunch in our yard.  It turned out that Mavry was still recovering from being sick (thus the rather stoic look in her birthday cake picture), but she still enjoyed playing with all the kids who came to celebrate.  Instead of a cake this year, she got a stack of small pancakes with two candles, berry syrup, and whipped cream.  She loves pancakes and was intent on her stack even after we finished singing and gathered for some songs on the guitar.  

 Ummm we did finally take down the Christmas lights sometime after the party.

Mavry's First Birthday Party

We had Mavry's first birthday party a few weeks after her actual birthday in order to buy us two extra weekends to work on the house and get ready.  We managed to get the big stuff crossed off our list before the party!  We got the place looking decent and Colin put in a fence in the front (with the help of a few friends).  I painted the fence (with the help of my mama group friends). 

For her party, we had egg casserole, pancakes, bacon, fruit, fresh squeezed orange juice from the orange trees along our fence, coffee and tea.  We made all the food ahead of time so that we wouldn't be cooking pancakes instead of enjoying our friends and it still tasted good!

Mavry wore a dress that was once mine, a birthday crown that I made her, and had watermelon sliced into a cake. 

Since someone had given Mavry a hanbok, the traditional Korean dress, we had her do the traditional Korean one year birthday "dol jabi" where we set out objects that could represent future careers and see what she would pick.  She went straight for the computer mouse.  Her second choice was the calculator.  She chose that over a wooden flute, paintbrush, ball, money, and pencil. So, apparently she will be like her dad!

I had some nice help getting the favor bags ready for the party.  A friend who I taught with in China came over to help cut the pineapple to get ready for dehydrating.  She cut them in the special Chinese way to make the most of the fruit.  The dehydrated pineapple went into the bag with homemade fruit roll ups, dehydrated oranges and apple slices.  

We had a really lovely warm sunny day to celebrate.  We were thankful for our huge shade tree

Happy birthday to our bright and wonderful Mavry Arden!

the birthday post.

For my birthday, Colin planned a fun afternoon at the Fullerton Arboretum and then a cookout at a nearby park.

He worked really hard the night before getting veggies and chicken marinated for skewers.

And he even made me a chocolate cake! I was very impressed.

The Fullerton Arboretum is really great - it's like a mini Huntington Gardens that's much closer to our house (and it operates by donations at the gate, so it's much cheaper).


Colin thought this huge plant was picture worthy.


I really enjoyed having a little gathering of friends together and was very impressed by Colin's effort to get all the food together! He made loads and we had leftovers for a while.

My friend Sinae posted some more pics on Facebook, and hers are much more beautiful, so you should check those out too.