Labor Day Birthday Party

We successfully hosted our Labor Day birthday party for my mother-in-law yesterday!  I got up super early after our drive-in date Saturday night to start getting everything ready.  It was a good thing, because we were prepping until the very last minute!  Here's our kitchen at about 6:30 am - working on the birthday cake.

Hosting is a lot of work!  The cake wasn't as hard as I thought it would be to make, and it ended up tasting pretty good.  I don't like cream cheese frosting, but I heard that it was good, too. :)

Here was our menu for the day - I put it up on our chalkboard in the kitchen for everyone to see.

 My favorite was the grilled veggies - bell peppers, zucchini, squash, asparagus + pea pods tossed in Italian dressing.  Tyler also made some turkey burgers in addition to the hamburgers because I like to be difficult and am probably the only one who would prefer the turkey burgers. ;)  The cajun fries I made were a pretty big hit, as well as Gramma's baked beans.

We set up everything outside and luckily the rain held out until about 7:30, after we had eaten and gotten a chance to hang out outside for a while.  I didn't get any pictures of the food set-up because it started to be eaten before we could even finish getting everything out on the table!

The make your-own sundae bar was probably everyone's favorite all day.  We didn't really end up narrowing down the toppings list too much.  Everyone had something(s) they really liked and there was plenty to go around.  We still have so much left over, I will be eating ice cream sundaes for weeks. Such a shame. ;)

I put all of the toppings in mason jars and laid out a piece of kraft paper with labels written for all of the toppings + ice cream flavors to create the sundae bar.

After dessert, we hung out & played some games.

  Here are Tyler & his sibs. It's not the easiest thing to coordinate everyone's schedules for something like this, so it was great that they were all able to come.

FYI, they did not match on purpose but I think it looks pretty cute in the picture!

The party was really fun but we are wiped.  Definitely grateful for the long weekend to get a chance to relax.  Hope you're all having a great LDW, too!