As if you hadn’t heard enough about Peanut’s first birthday, here’s a mile long post about his party. Even thinking about compiling this post stressed me out, so it took a while for me to muster up the courage.

I fully intended to do two birthday parties for him, one with the family (who all happened to be in town at the same time), and one with friends. Alas, time slipped away and only one happened. I would have combined them, but our tiny condo only allowed for so many people at a time. I’ll try better next year (and hopefully by then we’ll have a bigger house…)

I tried to come up with some kind of theme for Peanut’s party, just to tie everything together, but struggled to come up with something that I liked. About six months ago, I had pulled out my Hello, Cupcake cookbook and told Philip I was thinking about doing a creation from there for Peanut’s birthday. We searched through it and decided upon Old Swampy. Well, once the party began looming nearer and my little sister’s graduation happened to be the same day, and company was in town that entire weekend, I knew that poor Old Swampy would NEVER happen in my rush to get things done. But in his loving memory, I decided on a Green theme. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to hold everything together.

Once the theme was decided, I threw together his birthday invitation in Photoshop.

As far as decorations go, I kept them fairly simple. But I did want something that gave me some bang for my buck. I bought a few pieces of green patterned scrapbook paper, and then cut them into varying sized triangles. Then on the sewing machine I just sewed through the top of the paper and made several flag garlands. We hung one on the food table, one on the dessert table, one on the cupboards behind the dessert table, and one hanging from the ceiling in the middle of our great room.

I also printed out all 12 photos from Peanut’s month by month photo shoots and strung those up in order (using the same sewing method). It was so fun to see them all side by side and many of us spent some time mulling over them and picking our favorite.

I had no intentions of making an entire dinner, but we did want to feed people enough food that they didn’t have to eat before (or after) since the party was right around dinner time. So we ended up doing several appetizer type foods and called it good.

[fruit kabobs and bacon-wrapped smokies]

[spinach/artichoke dip with bacon, and bread]

[blue chips, veggies, and cheese fondue]

My favorite part of the setup was the dessert table.

I borrowed the two clear cake plates and the clear juice bottles (which are those store-bought coffee jars) from a friend. The white cake plate is mine, which I bought on sale from Target. I made three different kinds of dessert; homemade oreos (the kind made from devils food cake mix), scotcharoos, and yellow cake cupcakes with green buttercream frosting. I had leftover buttercream, so I used that to fill the oreos even though they call for a cream cheese frosting. The juice in the glasses was lemonade with a lime slice and a green and white striped paper straw from Can Do Chefs.

A birthday wouldn’t be complete without a nice rendition of “Happy Birthday” and blowing out a candle.

After singing, we stripped Peanut down and let him have at it with the cake.

He ate very little of it, despite how messy he got, and although I was nervous he would be up in the night puking his guts out, he happily slept all night without a peep.

After a quick bath, it was present opening time. We didn’t give him any birthday presents on his actual birthday, but instead we saved them for this day (which gave me another week to finish his Quiet Book…phew). His favorite present was, of course, the box of tissues that Philip gave him. He spent a good five minutes pulling every single one out.

We played one game with everyone — a “Guess Peanut’s Age” game — which we shamelessly stole from my sister-in-law. I made the game and I didn’t even get them all correct.

The evening ended with a group shot and putting Peanut to bed, since it was way past his bedtime and he was beyond exhausted.

[front row L to R: Philip’s Grandpa, my little brother Crawford, my grandad]
[back row L to R: Adam (Landen’s fiance) & Landen, Philip’s parents, us (obviously), my parents]

A happy birthday, indeed.