Home Cooked Foods for Matti's Dinner Birthday Party!

My little one turned two years old two weeks ago. I can't help but ask where did all the time go? It felt like yesterday when he was just so fragile, and so needy of me. Now, he can do things on his own, he can recognize the family members around him, and he had learned a lot of words, he could construct sentences too! Moreover, he had shown great affection to musical instruments.

For his second birthday, I decided a dinosaur theme. He loves dinosaurs too so when he saw his birthday cake, he was so excited!

My husband told me it was not good for us to spend much on his birthday when he can't appreciate that yet. Thankfully, my parents had sponsored most of the food that will be prepared for his birthday so this simple gathering and celebration was realized.

It was my parents who had sponsored the lechon, escabeche, desserts, and more. Wetold them beforehand about our plan of not holding a celebration but they insisted so this happened. All the decorations here were meant for his pre-birthday pictorial but I ended up with an outdoor photoshoot and get the decorations for his birthday dinner.

What we only wished was for our pastors to pray for him. So I am glad that our pastors came when we invited them and they had prayed over Matti and the entire family as well that we can bring up Matti according to the ways of the Lord.

I am also very grateful for the people who had helped me out, my sisters-in-law, my church friends, my husband of course who had taken a day off just so we could spend that day with Matti and the family.

The photos above shows the people who are really close to our hearts. Matti is a toddler who is usually just in the house but on weekends, he would be at church because that's where we always go during weekends. He had become friends with the churchmates and had also learned to love musical instruments played by the people around church.

Let me talk about the decoration a bit. As I had mentioned earlier, I bought them online for his photoshoot. At first, I was thinking of having an indoor shoot where I'd be putting up a tarpaulin cut into a circle shape just to make it unique then some dinosaur balloons as well but because we decided to host a dinner, I ended up with using them for the dinner decoration instead.

The balloons are very cheap online and the tarpaulin, I designed them myself with the use of Canva. I just looked for whatever available dinosaur templates, made sure there's a circle in there so I won't have a hard time cutting them after printing. There's a local printing shop in our town and getting it done was fast as well.

Matti anticipated for a birthday cake so he could blog candles. He had been practicing for months but unfortunately, he is still unable to blow out candles.

With the help of Pinterest, I got a dinosaur design and asked one bakeshop here in town that makes personalized cakes. The one on the right was worth Php 1600 while the one on the left is a premade cake which I also bought because I want him to have two cakes for his birthday but this one, I customized myself with some dinosaur toys.

The dinosaurs have party hats of course because it's Matti's birthday and the candles were bought online as well. They are really cheap! So the drip cake looked nice after getting the dinosaurs up there with some aesthetic trees and eggs! This one was worth Php 575.

As for the foods prepared, I bought chicken wings and made two types of sauces. But the guests didn't even bother getting any of the sauce provided, they just ate the chicken as is. It was still okay though. I marinated this myself and also cooked it myself.

There were also desserts that day. We made macaroni buko salad prepared by my sister-in-law, banana loaves which I baked myself, macaroons ordered by my mother as well as tortas.

I also cooked vegetable lumpia and bola bola. The bola bola was really good! I didn't expect it to be good actually as it was my first time to season and cook two kilos of ground beef and pork.

As for the lumpia, it was prepared a day ago with the help of my sister-in-law. She really helped me a lot with this preparation. I always find it enjoyable to roll lumpia and it is also Matti's favorite!

My father bought lapu lapu fishes and made escabeche. My mother complained that it the sauce was not red but all is well. My father told us he forgot to put soysauce. He also cooked beef caldereta, his specialty! I super appreciate my father for all the work he had done that day!

I also prepared vegetable salad. It is just a simple one, the ingredients included lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, singkamas, apples, black olives, and cheese. I made a honey lemon dressing as well for this but most of the guests didn't like the sauce, I guess they were used to having the grocery-bought dressing.

Aside from those mentioned above, we also had kinilaw which was a hit! The lechon of course and it came with a papaitan, pinoy style spaghetti was there too and chicken cordon blu which I forgot to take a photo. It was my sister-in-law who cooked that and a pancit guisado too!

Matti blowing his candles! He was anticipating for that moment but he couldn't blow the candles out so we asked some help from his cousin Amari but she wasn't able to blow the light out too. I ended up blowing it for Matti.

After the event, I felt drained as I was cooking and decorating from one in the afternoon up to around five in the evening. I really regret spending time on cooking rather than spending it with Matti. He was asking for me that afternoon so he could sleep, I attended to him for a few minutes and as soon as he was asleep, I went back to the kitchen. It was mostly James and Matti who were together that whole afternoon.

So after that, I thought it would be better to spend that day with Matti during his birthday instead of being busy with cooking and other things. So next year, we will instead travel out, go swimming, or will have a staycation instead.