1st Birthday Party

You know how first birthday parties are ridiculous and the kid wont even remember it?  Do you remember how I said 2 years ago that I would never throw one of those out-of-control parties and would just have a small family party?  Well... My name is Danielle and I over-did the first birthday party (hangs head in shame but is really smiling about the results)

We had so much fun.  Due to this website, I felt like nothing would be good enough.  Granted I am pretty sure that those are all professional planned parties costing thousands of dollars, they are SO cute!  I looked at the ideas there and also on pintrest and came up with lots of crafts that I wanted to do!  Then I remembered that I work full time and try to spend as much time with Blair when she is awake that I can.  I then made the decision that I am going to have to learn to survive on 6 hours of sleep to feel productive with my time and got to work.  Yet, it still wasn't enough, I had to call in the reinforcements... MOM (and dad, Jason, Janae, Nicole and Jen too eventually).  Seriously though my "un-crafty" mom was crafting up a storm.  She helped make poms, banners, curtains and her and Dad did all the food on the day of (Mexican bar!)


So the party was giraffe themed since we have been fond of the giraffes this year (sophie!).  Here is her invite:

Some crafts we did:

 kids favor bags

 Party room in the garage!  We hung curtains to cover the junk and add color and we made a cool chandelier of puff balls in the center!

Grammy sewed all of these beautiful banners with bright cloth we picked out.  We had some inside and outside!

 I made this picture board of all of Blair's monthly photo shoots

 These favors are Hershey Hugs and Kisses that have giraffes, giraffe print and "Hugs and kisses from Blair" on the bottom

 food labels...

We had about 40-45 people, including 10 kids.  We don't have enough room in our house so we turned the garage into a party room.  13 curtains and some decorations didn't turn out too bad at all!  It was nice to have the tables for people to eat at. 

We had a bounce house upstairs for the bigger kids...

Auntie Nicole made this adorable and DELICIOUS (seriously, people are still raving about it) cake for her. 

She was spoiled SO much!  We obviously opened most of her presents but she would chime in with excitement here and there when she saw something of interest. 

Her Gigi and great papa got her a cozy coupe and she just about died with excitement.  When I tried to take her out of it to eat cake she threw a tantrum until I had to actually undress her while she was IN the car.

She really enjoyed everyone singing happy birthday to her and then she dove right into her cake (she was an expert after her "practice round").  She enjoyed a second helping and gave us all a smile rubbing it in her hair and everything! 

The signs of good times... smashed cake and a corona bottle in the background (totally accidental that it was there and for the record, Blair only got one of them!)