Baby's First Birthday: The Party

I realize it's been a few months since I last posted, but life seems to always get in the way of blogging.  I've been dying to follow up on my last post about baby's first birthday party ideas, to include the actual ideas I included in my son's first birthday party, back in September.

As it turns out, I used many of the crafty ideas I highlighted in the last post, but cut corners where I could.  Hey, it takes hours to decorate and bake and mommy was up till about 1 a.m. the night before the party, baking the birthday cake, complete with customized orange colored cinnamon-sugar cake with chocolate chips, and customized turquoise icing!  We stuck with theme colors of aqua/turquoise and orange and kept with a Peter Rabbit theme for the party.  Although instead of all Peter Rabbit accessories, we included little Peter Rabbit stickers on the inside of personalized invitations that we made on Shutterfly and we included personalized "Thank You" notes with baby's birthday pictures as well.  Annie's Cheddar Bunnies and Party Mix were also a hit snack at the party.  And we included favors using "carrot" favor bags -- you'll see below.  In addition, we used a "Peter Rabbit" Christmas ornament as a cake topper, which we thought would be cute to include on our tree this year as a reminder of his first birthday party.

If you want the recipe to the cinnamon sugar cake, I had it pinned on Pinterest from this site here.  The few changes I made to the recipe was to add mini chocolate chips to the recipe and used food coloring to make the cake orange and the icing a turquoise-ish color.

Without further delay, here are some beautiful pics of our party.

We surprised him the morning of his birthday by sticking balloons in his crib when he woke up.  He looooved them, as you can see.  

I dressed up my son in a customized onesie, leggings and crochet hat from Chic Couture Boutique and KnotMoxie, both of which can be found on Etsy.com.  

We used the large TV to project a slide show of pictures from our son's first year.  

Nothing goes better with the old timey sodas (shown in the picture above) than old timey paper straws!

The Wedgewood Peter Rabbit dishes were past gifts, courtesy of my husband's grandmother.  We also ordered Peter Rabbit paper cups, napkins and plates for the party.  

The spread.  Complete with chalkboard paper used as a table runner (found on Amazon.com) on which I chalked in birthday messages to my special little guy. 

Yup! I screwed up the icing a tiny bit with writing out Happy Birthday.  I should have picked one that was easier to write with!

Peter Rabbit Hallmark Christmas ornament used as a cake topper.  It's a great keepsake from baby's first birthday for years to come.

Baby's smash cake (yes, it looks oh-so-homemade!) complete with #1 candle.  I reserved some cake batter  from the original batch and baked a smaller cake in a small Pyrex container.  I've also read baking in a tin coffee can works well for making your own mini-smash cake.  

The cake tasted delicious!  Much better than it looked :)