From Teachers to Mommies: First Birthday Party!

Happy Birthday to My Sweet Baby Girl!

We celebrated our cute little one's 1st birthday party last weekend. I can't believe how fast the time goes. It reminds me of this beautiful song by Mindy Gledhill.

I was so happy with how everything turned out and even happier with the beautiful family who came {through the snow} to share their love with our babe. I've never seen {E} so happy and excited in a big group, so I know she was happy everyone was there.

When I was trying to come up with the theme for her party, I had TONS of ideas including: sparkles, My Fair Lady, Winter "One"derland, balloons, rainbow, princess, and more! Then I started to think about what {E} really likes. My first thought was FOOD. Haha! My second thought was Books. I knew it had to be books. Her favorite activity is pulling all her books off the shelf and reading them over and over. Bonus! I could use all of her fun books as part of my decor. And as a former teacher, I already had a deep love of everything books. It was a done deal.

I found a couple of ideas on Pinterest to inspire the aspects of her party {see previous post}.

Kayla Aimee Writes

The Party Teacher

Johnson and Johnson

So here it is! All the fun decorations and stuff we ate and did!

Number 1 Collage & Favor

I loved picking out the pictures from {E}'s first year to include in this. It made my heart happy to see her cousins and other family members taking a minute to see how much she's grown and changed. You can also spy my favor for our party guests! I paired it with Dr. Suess' "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" book. It was a individual bag of colored Swedish Fish with a tag...

Other Decorations

I basically used every single children's book I had! I put them everywhere I could and used colorful accents everywhere else. For the banners I went to Deseret Industries and found some books with really sweet pictures and a regular chapter book that was all text. I cut out pennants and put them together with sparkly ribbon! I printed out the letters for "Happy 1st Birthday" and "One" for two special banners.

This was my favorite part! I used books to help plan the menu. I wanted the food to relate to the book. Here's what we came up with:

"Dragons Love Tacos"

Tacos in a shell or in a bag {yes they are delicious} with all the yummy toppings!

"The Very Hungry Caterpillar"

Lots of delicious fruit! Complete with clementines, {E}'s favorite!

"Peter Rabbit"

A beautiful spread of all the veggies Peter could want!

"If You Give a Cat a Cupcake"

For those too eager to wait for a slice of cake.

"A Bad Case of Stripes"

I bet you can't guess what's going on under that white frosting!

I wish I had gotten a better picture of the actual cake. We used a "1" shaped cake pan and it turned out huge and adorable.

Game

I love a good game at a party! I made a quick game to have each family present race to see who could match different books with their FIRST lines {because it was a FIRST birthday, yeah??}. I forgot to take a picture of the prize, it was a cute book with some fruit snacks.