My little ball of sunshine, Summer, turned three last Saturday. The next day, Dylan, my nephew and Kayo’s godson, also celebrated his birthday. And because these two special days fell on a long holiday weekend here in the Philippines, my in laws decided to make a family vacation out of it and take the celebration to our favorite beach in San Juan, La Union. It was a great idea! It was also something we’ve never done before because we usually just throw our kids’ parties at home, so everybody was pretty excited about it.
We put together a simple double birthday party last Saturday right at Urbiz Garden Plage, the beach house where we stayed for the weekend. Even if it was just us in the family who were there, we made an effort to make it fun for everyone, specially the kids.
The entire week before leaving the city, I prepared the decor, making sure they were easy to transport to the beach, while Amy and Kiddo, Dylan’s parents, who are proud and happy residents of La Union, took care of ordering the cakes and food from there.
Summer specifically wanted a purple party and a purple cake. These were things she had been clear about, while Dylan didn’t really have any preference (as long as there’s chocolate!). So I just made sure to mix in a lot of blue and green to Summer’s purple request in putting together decor. In that way, it didn’t look so feminine and also, it turned out to be a nice color scheme for a seaside party. For variety, I mixed in black on white watercolor patterns too.
I barely bought anything new to make the decoration but I did use up all the purple, green and blue materials I had in storage! I specifically enjoyed making Summer’s confetti covered number 3 cake topper and the paper hats. The children look really cute wearing them!
The party was really just about these two lovely children and us, family, being together. We had a great time eating (which we did so much of!), talking, taking photos of one another, goofing around and later on, swimming in the sea with the kids.
I’m most thankful that Summer enjoyed every moment of that day and she got to do almost everything she loved. She played with her cousins, she ate food she liked, she even went to the supermarket (Yes, she loves trips to the supermarket!) with her Papa and she got to blow her birthday candles on her purple cake. She went all out celebrating all day that she fell into a very deep sleep that night, much earlier than usual.
In fact, the entire weekend getaway turned out really great. Every meal was a feast and every moment spent having fun together or catching up on much needed rest. There was no swell and Kayo didn’t get to surf at all, but we were able to spend a good amount of quality time together as a family. To our surprise, Summer got over her fear of swimming in the sea and really enjoyed playing in the water. Even Emma warmed up to the ocean and had fun in the waves. I’m pretty sure it’s another weekend Summer will keep talking about for the next few weeks, maybe even months!
Leave a Reply