Hellobee

This past weekend we celebrated the girls’ first birthday with a large party! Given the girls’ current love of the classic children’s book Pat the Bunny, I tied that theme throughout their party.

I created the invitations by loosely matching the cover of the book. Although I sent out paper invitations to the grandparents, I alerted most other party guests electronically by uploading a photo of the paper invitation to pingg.com. This was really nice so that I could easily track attendance and send out reminders with little fuss.

For the venue, I settled on keeping things low-key and simply reserved a couple of rooms at a Chicago public park. The space was simple but I liked that it had public restrooms and lots of play opportunities for the children attending the party. An upside was that there was plenty of pretty outdoor space for some pictures.

Upon entering the party room, guests were greeted by a guest book. Again leaning on the Pat the Bunny theme, I used a large version of the book as a guest book. Although I admittedly felt a little silly having a guest book for a 1-year birthday party, I couldn’t resist once I found the large book while browsing one day at Barnes & Noble. It’s been fun already to read through the sweet comments that guests wrote in the book.

My main point of decoration was photos, photos, and more photos! I created a photo display for each girl by stringing 4×6 photos across the walls with small clothespins. These photos brought a great pop of color to the party, and also got people reminiscing about the past year (as well as laughing over some hilarious photos of the girls and their many moods over their first 12 months). I also added a few more strings of photos of the girls together and family shots to tie everything together.

In addition, I put together a small poster to thank all of our family and friends. I can’t begin to fully express my gratitude for all of the help and love that everyone has given us over the past year, and I wanted to honor that by displaying photos of everyone with the girls.

The final photo display was a month-by-month photo display of each girl over the past year. My mother-in-law meticulously put this together and gifted it to me a couple of weeks before the party, and it is so fun to look at the progress and development each month. I am saving the center 1-year photo opening for a picture of each girl from the party.

For food, I kept things simple. With the party starting at 10am, I didn’t have to worry too much about feeding guests a full meal. I had bagels and cream cheese, some turkey roll-up sandwiches, and a selection of fruit. My mom created a bunny dip display that turned out so cute, and helped to extend the bunny theme. For beverages, we made a simple peach punch and had bottles of water on hand.

For desert, my step-mom made dozens of cupcakes. Again following the bunny theme, we went with carrot cake cupcakes. We took a shortcut by having a baker create the top cookies in the theme of Pat the Bunny, and I think these turned out so adorable!

For the cake smash, my mother-in-law pitched in by creating adorable high-chair skirts in the colors of the party. I purchased small smash-cakes at our local grocery store and they matched the skirts perfectly. The girls had a great time digging in to those cakes!

I purchased the girls’ party outfits online from Bailey’s Blossoms. I found frilly rompers that matched the color scheme pretty closely, and I also found matching headband crowns. The best part of the outfits was the affordability, and I think I paid less than $15 for each outfit.

For the children’s take-home treats, I wrapped up some bubbles, sidewalk chalk, and stickers in the party’s color scheme. We also created some “carrots” for our little bunny guests by filling triangle-shaped baggies with goldfish crackers.

I will follow up soon with some of the top highlights of the party. For although I had a great time with the party details and decorations, I had an even better time connecting with all of our family and friends who attended, including our amazing surrogate and her husband!

All photos credited to the amazingly talented Julie Dietz. Thank you for helping us to remember this special day!