Birthday meerkats

My son turned two a few weeks ago. Amazing! We had a family party at our house on the day of his birthday (since it was a Sunday), and I managed to squeeze in a few crafty things. I tried to think of something that a toddler would actually consider a fun, special treat for a birthday party. Well, something he likes to do, but rarely gets to, is pull out Kleenex. So how about he gets a whole bunch of his very own Kleenex boxes he can pull as much from as he wants? In addition, when we've taken him to the zoo, his favorite animals were the meerkats. So I made meerkat Kleenex boxes!



I drew this using these photos as reference [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] and got it printed on the new wrapping paper option at Spoonflower. (You may recognize the background as being the same one I used for the brolgas, in a more "dried grass" colorway.) The rows are five inches tall to match the boxes, so I just cut them in to strips and glue-sticked them on. I also tried to make the repeat match the circumference of these boxes, but I made an error somewhere so it's about 1/4" too long. Oh well!

Continuing the meerkat theme, I also made meerkat cupcakes.



These are banana bread. I was originally going to try to make cream cheese frosting and color it with jam, but then I saw the speculoos (like ground up cookie paste) at Trader Joe's and used that instead. No mixing needed! The ears and eye patches are quartered prunes, and the eyes and noses are blueberries. I have wonderful memories of all the themed decorated cakes my mom made for my birthday each year, and even though my son is too young to request his own, I had a lot of fun continuing the tradition.

However, I think my son's favorite part of his birthday was that we removed the baby gate blocking off the kitchen for the day, to make it easier to serve lunch to everybody. The side effect of course, was that he could wander in whenever he wanted and open all the cabinets. That was just beyond exciting.