Birthday Party Madness!

We held off on E's birthday party in order to wait for G & G's return from Florida.  I found a party website that used the idea of "One Year in a Flash," since baby's first year (and frankly, baby's whole life it seems!) go by in such a seemingly quick time.  I ran with the idea, and had a good amount of fun doing it.

The first site on which I saw the idea was here.  I also took the color palette from this site, for a different party altogether.  One of my favorite ideas came from here, how to build your own photobooth.

I started with the invitation,

The favors didn't quite tie into the theme, but I made sugar cookies in the shape of a cupcake....

I had plans to buy a personalized birthday shirt for E, but it just wasn't in the budget.  Instead, I found this onesie at Target.

We set up the photobooth using items I picked up on freecycle as props, using the free program in the link above.

We didn't get EVERYONE in front of the camera, but those who did seemed to have had a good time!

 

 As far as food, we chose to fire up the grill.  We made hamburgers and hotdogs, as well as grilled vegetable skewers.  My mom made a green salad and a broccoli salad, M's aunt brought cole slaw, and Mom Mom brought a crockpot of meatballs and sausage.  I really wanted to keep it simple, especially since it wasn't a huge gathering (we expected about 20, including us), so didn't serve appetizers.  For dessert, we served ice cream cake for Grampy's birthday, and Strawberry Lemonade cupcakes, which were an even bigger hit than the Cherry Coke cupcakes I made for A's third birthday party!

Since the day was so lovely, the kids really weren't interested in the craft I had for them to do.  I picked up these foam picture frames for them to decorate with foam stickers and letters, with the intent of using it for their photobooth printout.  So I sent them home with the kids in zip bags.



E and Grammi played a fun game of peekaboo...

Playing with the bean bag toss with Grammi, and E stood completely unsupported for the first time (and, yeah, I haven't been able to get him to do it since...)




The last "little touch" I did for the party was to make a photo banner of pictures of E.  I chose one from each month, matted it on colored cardstock, and hung them using clothespins on pretty ribbon.  Picture of that coming soon.  I also made photo confetti of E's monthly pictures, but couldn't think of a use since the entire party was outdoors.

Hopefully everyone had a great time.  We had such a gorgeous day and it was so nice to have all our family together to celebrate our special E Boy!!