Aidan's 2nd Birthday

"Thomas!............And Friends!" I hear this about 100 times a day. My son is absolutely obsessed with anything and everything Thomas the Train, which is why we decided on that as the theme for his 2nd birthday.

I immediately started looking online for different ideas for everything from invitations to decorations and cakes. I did not see any invitations in the store that I liked, so I decided to print out a picture of Thomas to use on the front of the card. I then added the steam cloud with "Aidan's 2nd Birthday" to mimic the Thomas logo.

The back side of the card reads, "All aboard for Aidan's 2nd Birthday!" I then cut out a ticket shape for the back of the card to write all of the party details. I can't take credit for the creative wording of the invitation as I found that online.


Once the invitations were sent, I got to work on decorations. I did not want to spend a lot of money so I knew that I was going to be making decorations. Because it was train themed, I decided to make miniature versions of signs that you would see along a train track and hung them throughout the rooms we would be using.


I made another birthday sign using the Thomas logo subsituting Aidan's 2nd Birthday. Underneath that I hung up directional signs leading guests to various locations. The roundhouse is a resting place for engines after a days work, in our case the living room. Engine works is where the trains go to have repairs, in our case the kitchen. The wash down is where the trains go to be cleaned, for our party this was the bathroom. Finally the station masters' office was the master bedroom.

I majorly splurged on the Thomas balloon bouquet, but plan to hang the balloon in my son's room long after it has deflated so that he can enjoy it.

Finally, I constructed a Thomas centerpiece out of gift and shoe boxes and toilet paper rolls all wrapped up in blue wrapping paper and various scrapbook papers and ribbon. I read about a woman who made one for her son's party, but did not see any pictures, examples or tutorials for one online.

He really turned out cute though! I especially love the cotton balls coming out of the smokestacks!

Finally, I found a super easy video tutorial for this cake online.

I liked how it was a 2 dimensional view of the front of Thomas the Train Engine rather than a 3 dimensional model of Thomas. Unfortunately the link has since been disabled, but as you can see it involved making a round cake for the face, a large rectangle cake for the base and cutting a funnel shape out of a regular sized cake pan.

Aidan was a little confused by all of the attention as everyone was singing "Happy Birthday!"

It was a great party and so much fun to plan and prepare! I only wish that we could have the parties without him having to get any older!