Two-tti Fruity Birthday Party

Our baby girl turned two yesterday and what a second year it’s been! While preparing a picture banner for her birthday party, my husband and I couldn’t help but think how much she’s grown inside and out over the past year, and we both agree that she’s at such a fun age. The difference was extremely evident during her birthday party this past weekend. Last year, at her first birthday party (you can read about that here), she wasn’t even walking and had absolutely no clue what was going on, but this year she was running around with family and enjoyed the entire day. Even though I was occupied during most of it, it was so fun watching her truly take on the role of the birthday girl! I know she’s only two, but she absolutely milked it. 🙂

We kept this year’s party a little more simple than her first for a couple of reasons, but mainly because I’m 7-8 months pregnant. I can’t thank our immediate family enough for coming to celebrate with us and I couldn’t have done half of it without the help of my husband and our families, so a huge thank you to everyone!

Now, on to the partayyyyyy! I had a blast putting this all together. The theme was so fun, girly, and sweet. I felt like it truly represented our daughter. I wanted to share a little bit of a breakdown of the overall look and feel and what we decided to include throughout the afternoon for anyone looking to host a two-tti fruity bash!

Decor

I could have easily gone a million different directions with this theme. The fruit decor options I found were very overwhelming and most of them didn’t appeal to me. It was hard finding exactly what I wanted at first, especially with so many fruits and colors schemes. The two things I was sure of throughout planning was that I didn’t want anything loud or obnoxious and I wanted to incorporate girly touches throughout. After realizing that I needed to hone in on a simple palette, I also decided it made sense to pick a fruit to be the “star of the show”.

I ended up going with dark green, light pink and gold as the color palette for the party with a pineapple as the main fruit. I also added some tropical touches, too! Each of the tables had faux palm leaves (purchased at hobby lobby), pineapples and pink vases filled with white peonies. I purchased the eco-friendly palm plates from Amazon, the napkins from World Market and plastic cutlery from Target.

We have a huge tree in our backyard that we hung pineapples from, and we also placed other fruits at the bottom of the trunk. To create a nice backdrop, we hung a fabric and picture banner that I made along the top of our gutters as well as canvas letters we spray painted in gold. To welcome guests, we nailed gold letters to the tree in front of our house and placed fruit at the bottom of the trunk. Fruit made decorating easy and it was fun to place melons and bananas in different spots around our house. Our guests got a kick out of the amount of pineapples we had in our backyard – we had so many that we asked each of them to take one home!

Food

Always a priority in my book. I wanted both the dinner and dessert menu to be on the tropical side and include fruit (lots of it). I created my own menu sticks because I’m crazy and love labeling foods at parties.

Below are the recipes I used:

Dinner

Hawaiian BLTs (Chrissy Teigen’s cookbook Cravings)
Pulled BBQ Chicken Mini Sliders with Mango Salsa (adapted from What’s Gaby Cooking)
Hawaiian BBQ Skewers with Sriracha Lime Butter (Half Baked Harvest)
Strawberry & Goat Cheese Salad (adapted from Half Baked Harvest)
Peach, Tomato & Burrata Salad (Two Peas & Their Pod)
Honey Lime Rainbow Fruit Salad (Cooking Classy)
Chips & Peach Salsa

Dessert

Key Lime Pie (bought it frozen from Trader Joe’s)
Mini Fruit Pizzas
Coconut Lime Cupcakes (Two Peas & Their Pod)
Chocolate Covered Strawberries
Berry Butter Cake (Chowhound)
Hummingbird Cake (Food Network)
Dole Whip (Bigger Bolder Baking)

Activities & Gift Baskets

Because we were going to have a few kids there, I decided to put together a couple of outdoor games.

Flamingo Ring Toss
I bought these plastic flamingos and rings from Amazon and spray painted them to coordinate with the rest of the decor.

Lemon and Lime Tic Tac Toe
My husband went to the hardware store and bought a long piece of wood and asked them to cut it into four pieces. I spray painted the pieces and laid them out like a tic tac toe board. I also placed lemons and limes next to the wood for guests to play!

Fruit Letter Skewers
I found my inspiration for this on Pinterest, here. I bought these alphabet cookie cutters from Amazon and cut slices of watermelon and honeydew for guests to use.