Birthdays are a great excuse to give each child a bit of extra attention...
Eimear Hutchinson says she loves to make birthday's a special occasion for her girls. Picture: Stock
I ABSOLUTELY love celebrating the girls’ birthday parties. In a busy house like ours it is a great excuse to give each child a bit of extra attention in the lead up to their big day every year.
The girls have bought into my hype and start planning elements of their parties months in advance. I’m not that enthusiastic, but I do give a good few weeks’ attention to them so that I give myself plenty of time to get creative and make as much as I can myself.
And, like anything, you can do a little or a lot, there are enough demands on our time lately!
The cake is by far my favourite thing to do for the girls. It’s a tradition my own mum passed onto me because I don’t remember much about the actual parties I had when I was younger, but I vividly remember so many of the cakes she made for my birthday. There were caterpillars, trains and ice cream cakes and I can still remember the gasps of joy and awe when they were brought out.
These days I go full on patisserie mode on the girls’ cakes – you are talking layers and layers of cake and icing I spend hours agonising over. I remember when the eldest lady turned one, I made a cake, and in my short-lived attempt to live a pure and healthy life, I tried to make a healthy one and it was absolutely disgusting!
Worse still, my mother-in-law was over for the birthday, and she is a keen, skilled baker, I remember being so cross I’d make a bad cake, I vowed never to let it happen again. Sounds dramatic but from the ashes arose a chance to flex my creative juices numerous times a year.
One of my biggest hits was a Barbie cake where the cake part was Barbie’s dress. I made a Peppa Pig cake in the shape of Peppa’s head – for that I simply downloaded an outline of her head, printed it out, and used that as the guide for cutting the cake shape. The girls used to love the Netflix show Spirit so one year I made loads of cupcakes and arranged and iced them in the shape of a horse galloping. There was a lot of washing up with that cake as I had so many different coloured buttercream icings. Harry Potter featured heavily a few years in a row too, along with Paw Patrol.
This year I have another Barbie cake to plan – I let the girls have a look through Pinterest with me and we get an idea of what they would like, there’s a bit of give and take as they innocently think my skills have no limits.
Another element of the parties that we love planning are the party bags. I am lucky in that I have the Cricut, which makes creating unique little gifts for party bags quick and easy to do. That said, you don’t need a Cricut, there are lots of things you can make that don’t require anything more elaborate than scissors and some glue. My Senior Infant visited the library with her class recently so she decided that because they all got chapter books during their visit, that bookmarks would be a nice thing to put in the party bags. We are going through a hairband craze in the house – again so easy to make, a few simple lines of sewing and you’re done. I made 18 hairbands during two episodes of Bridgerton the other night and I know it’s a little gift that all the girls will love.
I made up a little beaded bracelet kit one year with each child’s name in letter beads so they could make their own personalised bracelets – I was particularly pleased with that one. I always make personalised animal bar wrappers, which anyone can do as long as you have a programme like Microsoft Word and a printer – size your rectangle 8.3cm by 12.8cm for the perfect fit.
I love making decorations too, but usually I reuse the same few bits over and over. I have a banner that gets wheeled out for every occasion and a few balloons, even my time and skills know a limit!
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