Dallas' winter themed first birthday party...
Wow, has it been a year already? I guess it has.
When I had my middle son, #Dimuel, I was so excited to finally be able to plan summer parties. Being a December baby myself, I dread planning winter birthday parties. Don't we attend enough Thanksgiving and Christmas events in November and December? Well, much to my surprise, I had a BLAST planning this snow themed party at my house.
We were fresh off of our Thanksgiving Disney Cruise (5 days later to be exact). The thought of unpacking from our cruise, preparing a post-Thanksgiving dinner, planning a birthday party, and completing my Christmas shopping... all in one week... Whew! I am tired just thinking about it.
The decorations were pretty simple. I am the DIY queen, but there just wasn't enough time in my day to make everything myself. Lucky for me, JoAnn's Fabrics had some amazing little knick-knacks on their clearance shelves. As always, I turned to Pinterest for some ideas. For 99 cents I snagged a few packs of felt adhesive snowflakes that I paired up and stuck together back to back. I filled some white balloons with helium and hung the snowflakes at different lengths from the balloons with white ribbon. These were a huge hit with the kids and the adults.
On the fireplace mantle, I hung a banner with photos of Dallas each month of his first year (another idea that I found on pinterest). I grabbed a few sheets of glitter scrapbook paper (also on sale at JoAnn's) and used my Cricut Explore Air 2 to design and cut the borders for each month. I absolutely LOVE this idea.
The guests ages ranged from 1 to 11 so it was difficult to come up with ideas to entertain everyone. I created a ball pit in the living room for the toddlers. The older children followed me to basement where I had a sheet covering the carpet and 3 gingerbread villages. Each village had 3 houses, candy, icing and other embellishments. The children had a great time constructing their houses, but only one house made it home with it's builder. Everyone else ate their houses, lol.
This was the smallest party that any of my children have ever had, but I wouldn't trade it for the world. Initially, I had mommy guilt for not throwing a big shindig for my little cuddlebug, but this was perfect. I think my kids can expect much smaller parties going forward.
To see more pics from the party, head over to my Pinterest page.