A Very Veggie Birthday

After Christmas, I was totally worn out!! So many projects and shopping and fun in such a short time had me needing a break! So after a couple of weeks off to get the new year started, I decided I ought to go ahead and start planning Ian's first birthday party. I thought that if I took a longer amount of time to plan everything, it wouldn't be so hectic. Ha! I probably put MORE work into it since I had so much time.

Before I had Ian, I had sworn up and down that I would not be one of those parents who threw their child an extravagant first birthday party. Nosiree...that definitely would NOT be me! No need to spend our precious, hard-earned money on frills and froo-froo's that the child wouldn't even remember.

So when I started planning Ian's party, my plan was to keep it simple. No hiring magicians or balloon animal artists or renting old-fashioned popcorn makers or bounce houses. Not this year anyways. I was just going to have a simple party. First up - decide the theme. Easy-peasy! My child (back in January) would only watch Veggie Tales. That's it. Nothing else. So we were going to throw him a very Veggie fun party! Second item on the party planning check list - location. Again - easy. I wanted it either at the park or my mom's house (she's so sweet to let me volunteer her for stuff!) That decision really only took about a minute. It might rain on the day of the party. And we might need the kitchen. Nana, here we come!

All that was left was planning the menu, a few games, and finding Ian a couple of birthday presents. Easiest party ever, right? Wrong. So wrong. Was I ever wrong! To figure out what kind of games I wanted, I started researching Veggie Tales party themes. Oh boy!! Is there ever a ton of stuff on the internet! I spent hours reading through different party ideas, jotting them down, asking James about them, and looking for more ideas. I love to research things...in fact, I may be a little addicted to researching whatever project I am currently working on. I have to be careful because it can be super time consuming. But in this case, I honestly had no idea there were so many creative ideas for a Veggie Tales party out there! Did I mention I am a very thorough, methodical person too? So when I research something, I want to make sure I uncover every stone and look in every nook and cranny. That meant hours and hours reading through other's party ideas, browsing Party City, and looking on E-bay, Etsy, and Amazon. It was a tad overwhelming!

And that was all before I discovered the smash cake and first birthday photos on Google images. Adorable!!! Little girls in cute tutus. Little boys with fun hats. Tiny tots standing by the candid wooden "1", showing off their age. I knew we had a fantastic photographer, so I really wanted to get creative with Ian's first year photos. That meant many more hours on Etsy, E-bay, in Babies-R-Us, and at various other stores looking for the perfect little smash cake outfit for Ian. Actually, it didn't need to be perfect. I just wanted a simple "1" on his shirt and hat and could not find that ANYWHERE! Every bib and shirt I found said something like "Happy First Birthday" or "Birthday Boy" or "It's My Birthday" and really weren't in colors I liked. Not what I had in mind at all. Finally, I found this great store on Etsy called Little One Boutique. There was this adorable, royal blue hat and diaper cover set that had a matching shirt. The description of the shirt and bib mentioned that that particular design matched The Big One Dots for boys first birthday partyware. How fun! I now had something else to go research...haha! I was glad I did though, because I ended up finding this adorable candle! Way cuter than the normal "1" candle Wal-Mart carries!

So, with such a cute candle and smash cake outfit, I had to get a cake worthy of all that cuteness! Go go research gadget! I found a bakery nearby that wasn't too terribly expensive and ordered a double layer 6" cake to be picked up the day before our photo shoot with Kay. Kay is amazing!! You really ought to check out her website - kmdigitalimages.com. She has an idea for detail and really brings out the personality of each person in the photo. Oh - and she is actually affordable! I have never met a professional photographer who is so good with such good rates! So you can imagine how excited I was that we were going to the Dallas Arboretum for Ian's one year pictures! Kay had done bridal shots with James and me there a few years before, so it was special to be going back with Ian. This smash cake collage makes all that hard work worth it! I could stare at this piece of art for hours!

Aahhh! I just love it!

In the meantime, back behind the party planning scenes, a few of the shirts at Little One Boutique got me thinking about a really cute present for Father's Day for James and his dad. Go go research gadget again! I'm about to make another plug, but I firmly believe in sharing good business and this lady does good business! I cannot say enough about how amazing Dawn, the store owner and creator of all those cute items, was to me during this process! It took several days and several e-mails to figure out exactly how to make my idea work. She has a very high order volume, yet still took the time to give me a ton of individualized attention and was very patient with all my brainstorming.

Back to party planning - I had run across a cute picture of a treasure chest cake that I thought would work perfectly for Ian. He love, love, loves to unpack things and I thought it would be a good representation of that! A very Ian cake. Then we found out the cake decorator we had in mind was going to be out of town the week of Ian's party. Time to revamp the cake design and do it ourselves! I started looking at Veggie Tales pirate ships on E-bay and ended up accidentally ordering one through the "Or Best Offer" link. I had no idea that if you submitted a "best offer", the system was set-up to automatically accept or reject it. I thought the seller had to do that. So when I submitted a best offer and it was automatically accepted, a Veggie Tales pirate ship cake became the new design! Add a few gummy fish (thanks to Toys-R-US) and some blue frosting and good old fashioned Vanilla Wafer sand and we were good to go.

Since we were going with the Veggie Tales pirate theme for the cake, my awesome and very talented hubby helped me come up with a cool design for the invitations. I was really pleased with how they came out!


But, I couldn't just give up the idea of those cute little treasure chests so easily. So, my very, very sweet and accommodating mother agreed to make them for me. They were easy enough to make. I had mini loaf pans that baked the cake mix into the perfect treasure chest shape and we just frosted that and used M&Ms as the treasure chest straps. Licorice rope was used to separate the top of the chest from the bottom. Of course, it wasn't enough to make just one for Ian. I wanted to make ones to celebrate Aunt Kt's birthday and Grammy Jen's graduation too! It really is a wonder my family didn't throw me in a pool during all this planning! (They seriously joked about it though...)

Then it was time to decide on the games. We found a cool blow up pirate chest and decided to bury pirate rubby duckies at the bottom for the kids to find. We filled the chest with a ton of water balloons that we filled with air (water balloons are smaller than regular ones, so we could fit more of them in there). We also had a little blow up ring toss for the kiddos, a Veggie Tales Pirate book for story time, and a stuffed Pirate Larry (also known as Elliott) for a Veggie version of Hot Potato. Turns out we never did story time, the ring toss, or Veggie Hot Potato, but the balloons were a big hit!

For the adults, we had ribbon necklaces that people could win from each other by catching someone saying "one" or "first". We also came up with a little multiple choice questionnaire with fun trivia facts about Ian. I'll post that soon.

And, of course, we had to have a slide show of pictures of Ian from this past year! That has been posted already.

So, see? Party planning is super hard work! And you can kind of see how one thing just led to another right? This whole big party shabang wasn't what I had in mind when I started. There were just too many good ideas out there to pass up!

Here's another look at one of the best ideas.

Awww...just melts my heart! I had to share it again! Thanks so much Kay and Dawn for your hard work and dedication to your professions. And thank you Ian for being such a wonderful photography subject. You are cuter than words can express (which is why I had to get pictures...haha!) and truly make this Momma's heart happier than you could ever know.