Caterpillar Countdown: Tuesday

Dear Diary,

It’s day 2 of party planning!  I created a Very Hungry Caterpillar board on my Pinterest page and collected ideas online.

On Tuesday, I asked Erica to design decorations.

As you see from Erica’s page, she doesn’t charge an arm and a leg to create caterpillars.  Since she just opened up Pickles & Pinwheels, she told me she could create almost anything I wanted even if it’s not in her shop.  I asked her to make centerpieces, party hats, party blowers and place mats.  I later sent Erica an email, and she created a birthday banner as well as a Grow With Me Caterpillar —each circle of the caterpillar’s body has a picture of my daughter for each month she has been on the earth.

Very Extravagant: Order the items on Etsy or the Eric Carle Museum gift shop.  The online store sells hats, horns and other decorations.

Very Affordable

Create menus on your computer.  I typed up a Caterpillar Cuisine menu, printed it on white card stock paper, punched a hole in the corner–bought  a butterfly hole puncher at Michael’s–and tied ribbon through the hole. Since the museum’s menu includes pizza, chicken nuggets or hot dogs, I made sure to get goodies for the guests under one.  I stuck to the theme and bought Apple Harvest Wagon Wheels & strawberry yogurt melts for appetizers, Apple & Pear and Apple & Sweet Potato Fruit Squeezables for the main course and apple & pear 100% juice for the beverages.  All of those Gerber graduate items were purchased in bulk at Sam’s Club. I also used the butterfly puncher to make confetti. Well, technically I paid my 9-year-old nephew in candy to fill the zip loc bag with paper butterflies.

Erica made face pieces for the balloons. The Children’s Museum package comes with free helium latex balloons to make a caterpillar.  You just need to buy a red balloon for the head, green balloons for the body and ribbon. All of those items I picked up at the Dollar Tree.  You can cut out the eyes, ears and nose from green, yellow and purple card stock paper.   I also bought lots of goodies to stuff the favor bags at the Dollar Tree, such as mini butterfly hair clips and bottles of bubbles in the shape of ice cream cones.

But I was still hungry to plan more.