Waltzing Matilda: A Nature Girl's Birthday

A garden themed banner made just like this one.

Shortcake's birthday was Saturday. It started off with jumping up and down in excited expectation as our company arrived Friday afternoon. My mom and her husband came up from South Texas to celebrate this double-digit occasion!

She chose a Lanie theme for her birthday. For those of you who don't know, Lanie is the American Girl Doll of the Year. Usually, my girls are only interested in the historical characters, but Lanie is special. She has outside genes, a best friend who moved to Indonesia and is working with orangutans, a nature-loving aunt who gets her garden going and then goes to Costa Rica to record the sounds of the Three-Wattled Bellbirds. Lanie is a little bit jealous that her world isn't as exciting but then discovers that a whole world of nature can be found and enjoyed right in her own backyard.

Monarchs on the table, flowers, leaves and a little bunny like Lanie's pet, Lulu.

Part of the decorations included making postcards from Indonesia and Costa Rica. (I totally made these up as most of the communications in the book are in email form.) I even found some pictures of stamps to print off adding a hint of authenticity.

We decided to explore the nature in our own backyard by preserving some of our newly turned leaves in wax...

...and visiting a local botanic garden where we saw sights beautiful,

interesting,

and odd!

Yes, those are women wearing period costumes including one wearing a very non-period baby wrap and baby.
Strange birds at the botanic gardens!

After our trip to the garden, we came home for a cookout and some cake! She picked out a cake design that we found online and I made a few alterations.

The pink and purple flowers are elusive Minnesota Sunshine flowers made with real sunshine seeds from the land of 10,000 lakes!

It was a Chocolate Chocolate Chunk Cake and it was fabulous with a light buttercream frosting and mostly M&M decorations. Really cute!

As the sun set into it's bed, we also collapsed into ours, having enjoyed ourselves in the pleasure of watching our sweet girl grow up a little bit more before our very eyes.