Denton's Birthday Recap - Meredith Rines

We survived! We had our son’s second birthday party over the weekend at a park with friends and family. It was a blast! So. Much. Fun. I just love watching our son play with his cousins, he always looks so much bigger when he plays with the big kids.

We decided to do something easy this year – we had the party at a park instead of our house. We also opted to have it later in the day to save on our food costs (we didn’t have to serve lunch!). Here’s a few snaps from the party.

I ended up starting to plan for our son’s party back in February. I knew with tax season, my exam, and a few other parties I had in the works I would need all the time in the world to make it happen. I also wanted to keep ourselves under a pretty tight budget this year. Last year for his first birthday party, I worked hard at making a lot of things myself (like his smash cake) so I could stay under budget. This year, I wanted to do the same thing, but with less work (HA!).

The first thing I did back in February is I created our party budget (I used this template HERE). I wanted to be realistic, but also not get too crazy. I think kid’s birthday parties are so easy to overspend on. You’re trying hard to make it fun and have lots of yummy food for everyone so it can be easy to get carried away with.

Once I had the budget, the next thing I did was transfer by saved Ibotta reward dollars to our paypal account. I had close to $60 saved, which was the bulk of his budget. Once the money hit that’s when I booked the pavilion at the park and started looking at decorations. I browsed Party City and Amazon, and they had some great decorations, but they were a little on the high side.

So I opted to do a mix – I bought one tablecloth, a set of plates and napkins from the store (just like these HERE) and then I went to Dollar Tree to buy the rest. I ended up spending around $8 for the rest of the plates, silverware, cups, napkins and tablecloths for the party. I also decided to not go too crazy on the decorations.

At the park there were 8 tables, but I only bought tablecloths for three – thinking one or two for food and the other for the kids to eat at. I also made the number two out of tissue paper (keep reading for directions on how to make it yourself!), which was really cheap since I used what I had on hand.

Finally, I used the leftover Halloween costume iron-on fabric to finish his outfit. Using Canva, I printed out dinosaurs onto the transfer paper, ironed it on his shirt and that was it.

We also made most of the food ourselves and by having it later in the day, we decided we only needed snacks. We ended up making pinwheels, meatballs, chili cheese dip, rice krispie treats, fruit tray and a veggie tray. I bought chips and dips to have with it.

We ordered a few items for the party to make it easy on ourselves – I bought a cupcake cake from our local bakery. It turned out perfect. J also found a great pretzel place, called Pretzel Boys not too far away so we ordered a dinosaur shaped pretzel from them. On top of that, I found these perfect dinosaur toys at Dollar Tree. So I picked up eight of these bad boys to hand out as favors.

I made a quick (less than 4-minute) video on how to make the tissue paper sign. It was so easy to make and took us less than 20 minutes to finish. You can watch the video online or down below:

That’s it! That was our son’s second birthday party. I think it turned out perfect. The weather was perfect for a park party, we were close to the playground for all the kids to have fun on and the food turned out great!