ocean & beauty: birthday with a mission....love!

my mission: waste as little as i can...that is actually a life long mission but with birthdays & celebrating it can be really hard to do...there is a desire for abundance, color, fun and a lot of everything...FREEDOM!! i decided to look into where the wealth is in the household... CREATIVITY & stuff! we all seem to have a lot of stuff... so i love to use my stuff for times like these... i looked online to see about eco/green birthdays and honestly it was not only boring but not so pretty... and beauty is SO important. hello. first i started in the kitchen (shocking..) creating the cake.... joshua wanted to make something too so he went into the studio (a place in the house that looks like a painters studio b/c it has paints, brushes, all sorts of wacky collectibles but no light...sometimes i find my muse out drinking it's so depressing...and guess where there is light... IN THE KITCHEN!!)

we wanted ocean to know it's his special day & make the house a bit different in feel and vibration.. hippie lingo. this is what we came up with... and we had a blast staying up till midnight doing it together!

i collect & reuse these strawberry cartons..they are great for so many things & maybe an art installation i will do one day.... i have a ton of these puff colored balls & an old elmo card given to us a long time ago....nothing spectacular or genuis..just a little table piece that ocean will look at and want to touch and play with that signifies that it's his day! i also new those balls may end up all over the house and that was fine too.. just the asterisk at the bottom to surrender to if you try this at home.

another sweet addition of random chinese lanterns i had in the studio connected with old ikea ribbon and some little ribbons in the center... just these touches of birthday love hanging up around the house created a celebration feeling for everybody.

then there was the cake...

buttermilk layer cake from the new joy of cooking.... via my sister-n-law who knows good cake. if you can believe it - this is my first birth of a birthday cake... i love to support the bakers and their beautiful sculptures and such.. couldn't necessarily do that this year... first it was a choo choo cake and i was going to get the mold for it... then the mold is made in china & who knows what will leach into the cake type metal.. so of course i end up at william-sonoma where i find the perfect choo choo mold. again.. lets remember we are on a budget... so i figure i will just put percy (one of thomas the trains choo choo's) on the cake.. and he will LOVE that too. what happens? neither of these things but i had to give you the backdrop.. b/c there is a point & that is to ENJOY everything you are doing, create with freedom and no ties of expectation from yourself or other....it is the love you put into everything and that is what i want him to take with him into his journey. i think we forget that a lot these days.. creativity and love.. amen!