Celebrating Mr. One-derful

It’s hard to believe my sweet little guy is already more than a year old. It seems like just yesterday we were bringing him home from the hospital. I’ve learned so much since having this little boy – how to relax and go with the flow, how to keep one child occupied while the other is constantly attached to your boob, and most importantly, how to expand my love. That one was easy. It just happens automatically. It’s hard to comprehend how much I love my two kiddos.

Anyway, that’s not the point here today. The point here is that we threw our boy a quick little shindig to celebrate his first birthday. When our daughter turned one, we went ALL. OUT. Multiple desserts, decorations everywhere, a special tutu for the birthday girl to smash cake into.

You never realize how true-to-life those Luvs commercials are until you’re living it. This birthday was low-fuss and low-stress, but still accomplished our goal of appropriately marking the occasion!

For food, I decided to order catering from Kroger. Although it sounds basic, we’ve always been really impressed with the quality and presentation of their items. We were expecting 30-50 people, so I ordered a large fruit tray, a veggie tray, a caprese salad, a “fancy” cheese tray and 100 mini cookies (because we had lots of kids coming, and also, I really love cookies).

 

I kept the decorations really simple as well. We have only been in our house for just about a year and while I wish we had the time and money to finish decorating completely right now, the benefit is that we had a nice open wall in our dining-room-turned-not-quite-an-office-yet.

I bought the paper fans at Hobby Lobby in shades of navy, white, gold and kind of a natural brown. Our daughter helped me tape them up on the walls and then we topped it with a tassel banner (also from Hobby Lobby) to hide the strings.

On the top of the sideboard, we added some cupcakes and cookies. The glitter 1 and letters are leftover from her first birthday nearly 4 years ago! And finally, we finished it off with the birthday boy’s birth photo and monthly photos in a frame. It made for a nice little stopping point for our guests to take a look at him over the first year.

My amazing in-laws handled the big birthday cake. I sent them a handful of photos from Pinterest that I liked, told them to stick with something “blue-ish or whatever” and let them choose what to do. I was stunned with their execution.

My mother-in-law bakes the cake and my father-in-law decorates. They’ve done a couple of weddings and lots of birthday parties and I’m always so impressed with what they come up with.

I made the smash cake for our guy, just as I did for our girl. Remember the Big Top Cupcake Mold that was kind of popular years ago? They’re perfect for smash cakes! Ok, they’re actually a lot of cake and you’ll have to throw some of it out after a baby has mushed it all around, but they sure are fun!

He did pretty well with it. I’d say he ate about 20% of that before the sugar coma set in and he literally face-planted in the cake. The birthday boy also had to take a break for a bath afterwards.

From decorations to food, we spent just over $200.

3 Lessons:

1. Don’t be a hero. If making all the food is going to stress you out, order from somewhere and call it a day.
2. With decorations, go for impact. Although I would’ve loved to have a celebratory element in every room, focusing the decor in one area was festive and fun. People could hang out for a few minutes, take in moments from our boy’s first year, and then move on to a conversation or basketball game.
3. Remember what’s important. I briefly debated rearranging all the prepared food onto my own trays, simply so that someone MIGHT think I had prepared it all myself. Then I decided that no one coming to the party cared about that. They were coming to see a cute baby smash some cake and no one gave a damn if the fruit was on a black plastic tray or in a ceramic serving dish.

The weather the day of the party was chilly, so everyone was inside. The kids played in the basement and the adults wandered between the kitchen, office, dining room and family room (where we had the UC game on). Our son was in the middle of everything, pushing toys around on the ground, stealing food from people’s plates and being handed from one grandma to the next for snuggles. I’d call the party a simple success!