Ben turns FOUR! A Polar Express/hot chocolate bar party and printables.

(Lost most of my pictures when I switched from WP to blogger. Slowly working on putting them back, but it's a massive undertaking so please forgive the broken image links!)

Ben turned FOUR today.  Four.  He's not a baby.  At all.  Although I suppose I'll always call him a baby.  Because he's my firstborn.  My little boy.  My baby.  Someday he won't let me call him that, so I'm going with it for now.

I'd originally planned no party this year.  I figured, hey, a kid doesn't need a big, elaborate party every year, right?  Now that we have three kids, we can't exactly afford big, elaborate parties, either.  And man...it's a lot of stress.

Then, over the weekend, I got hit with either a case of Mommy Guilt or maybe I just have a certain quota of parties to throw and this year I hadn't met it, but either way, I decided on Sunday evening that I wanted to do a small celebration.  It hit me that this is the first year he will really, truly get and appreciate a celebration of him and his day.  Last year we had to cancel his party because he was sick, so the last party he had was his 2nd birthday, and he surely didn't get or appreciate that one.

Anyway, my gears got turning quickly and I knew what I wanted to do.  Ben is a December baby, and more than that, a December 20th baby.  Five measly days before Christmas.  We could go out of our way to avoid acknowledging that, or we can embrace it and have fun with it.  I chose the latter this year.  A Christmas-themed party.  A hot chocolate & Polar Express PJ party!  We donned our PJs, drank hot chocolate jazzed up with fun stuff like marshmallows and caramel syrup, watched The Polar Express and ate pizza.  I let him invite just a few friends.  Our house is small and this wasn't planned far enough in advance to find somewhere to host, so we had to stick to just a few close friends.

We had most of the stuff for the party already, so aside from borrowing a few things, baking a few things and quickly designing a few things to print off, it was pretty low-key and easy.  And lots of fun!

I'm not a hand-letter-er, obviously, but I was at least proud of that banner at the bottom ;)

The photo booth props :)

Can you tell how much Ben looks up to this kiddo (even literally)?

So sad his eyes were closed!

I'm looking quite lovely here, no?

Love these two girls.

Cookie dough party favors.

So. Much. Fun.  Ben had a great time!  I think he truly did get it, and I'm so glad I threw this together even though it was last-second.

And today, his actual birthday, we were greeted to a nice, fluffy snow.  Perfect way to spend a birthday with a perfect kiddo.

(Remember to click on each image to expand them to full size for high resolution before you right click and save them to your computer.)

Fa

La (gray)

La (blue)

Blank red (I typed Ben on this one)

Hot chocolate bar (8x10)

The bell still rings... (8x10)

The Polar Express (5x7)

Syrup labels (I printed mine on full sheet labels that I stuck on little jars I had)

As for the other things we used at the party, you can find the following here:

I used the cookie recipes and labels found here for our party favors.  I just edited them a little bit to fit our color scheme/font family

I used the photo booth mustache/lip props found here.  I printed them on cardstock, cut them out and hot glued them to extra straws.

I used the table tents found here.  I had to go in and edit them so that they would be foldable, since I didn't want to glue them to sticks.  I did that by deleting the first and third row, like this:

I use gimp for all my editing if you're looking for something.  I'm not fancy enough to own or know photoshop, so I make do and it's surprisingly great for everything I need.  And FREE, best of all!

The free fonts I used were:

Treehouse Demo

SF Covington SC Shadow

KG All Things New

DeLouisville

Bergamot Ornaments