Monday Made: A little rainforest party

We had a mini belated celebration for baby J's first birthday during the weekend, since both kids had recovered from their colds. Initially, we invited two families over for the party, but our neighbors couldn't make it. Turned out that might have been a good thing, since we realized later that we could only have another 2 more adults over for a meal, since we only have 4 chairs in our apartment!

So we just had a simple meal (we ordered pizza and salad), but I couldn't help wanting to dress up the table a little. As Junior J and I have been looking at rainforests for the past week, we decided to do a rainforest theme for the decorations. I cut out leaves out of cardboard packaging, and the boy got busy painting them all green:

I was rather proud of him since he sat there and
patiently covered every single leaf  with paint (and both sides too!).

Then I wrote out the letters in crayon and he painted over them.

They all got strung up, and a toucan completed the picture! (I printed the toucan from here.)

And of course, we baked for the party. Since we were reading about cocoa trees (after watching a video about them in the rainforest), we opted for chocolate chip muffins. The boy and I made these using this recipe, but added in cocoa powder for more chocolately goodness!

He helped with all the mixing and scooping, and also put in the muffin cups into the tray.
He had quite a bit of trouble separating the cups, can you spot one which is double-lined?
I only noticed it after looking at the photos!
(To make the bunting, I used twine from Beautiful Revelry, some washi, plus some bento food picks.)

All in all, we had a lovely time hanging out with friends. A simple celebration, something we like!