31 Oct 2010 16 Comments

Jordan’s First Birthday Party

The birthday party post is finally here! I know it’s long overdue but I just didn’t have time to write since we went to Hawaii after his party. Our Small Fry’s first birthday party  was a great party even though he wasn’t feeling too well. He was running a slight fever from his 12-month shots the day before so we didn’t get to take as many pictures of him smiling. I was so excited for this celebration and we were truly blessed to have so many family and friends come share our Small Fry’s very special day with us.

A beautiful sunny October weather, and help from my amazing husband, sister, and my dad, the few hours preparing the clubhouse for the party was stress free! I have to say I truly enjoyed planning all the details for this party. So, let me share those little details I’ve been talking about for the past few weeks.

In order to fully enjoy ourselves and not have to think about food and photos, we asked Jun Sotelo who did the catering for the Small Fry’s baptism last January to cater the event for us again. We hired Keely Saranto to document the day and having her around that day meant one less thing for Michael to worry about. She was awesome to work with and we are so happy we found her! We are still waiting for the pictures from her so I’ll be sharing them later.

The very first thing I did was coming up with a birthday theme. Since I don’t go for the mainstream cartoon (or other) character theme things, I decided to do an animal safari theme. I created a banner design and had it printed in two different sizes of vinyl. We used one outside the clubhouse at the parking lot entrance and the bigger one inside the clubhouse. Since my parents just moved here from the Philippines, I asked them to have it printed there since it’s a lot cheaper compare to about $60 that I’d be spending on a small banner.

I created a photo book for Jordan, summarizing his first year of life (from the day we found out I was pregnant up to his first birthday) and ordered it through Shutterfly. I left a few blank pages on the back of the book for people to sign. Michael had this great idea of using the Small Fry’s wooden blocks to spell ‘Happy Birthday Jordan’ so we set that up with the book on the welcome table.

I ordered 120+ balloons and used some of it as centerpieces. I bought a 5×5 brown boxes, decorated it with a personalized birthday tag and tissue papers and put the bouquet of balloons in it.

As for the desserts, I baked 120+ cupcakes. I made chocolate cupcakes with pistachio almond buttercream, white chocolate cupcakes with silky chocolate frosting and red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.

I also baked a 6″ round chocolate cake with fudge filling and covered it in fondant. I made number 1 and animals cupcake toppers using fondant as well (I will write a separate blog post about the baking and decorating later).

I arranged them on the cupcake tower that I also made at home using cheap cardboards.

Since I already made a lot of cupcakes, I only picked a few more desserts to add to the dessert table such as leche flan, chocolate covered pretzels and mini brownies. Everyone loved the dessert table and the cupcakes were a hit and everyone left with a sugar high!

I HAVE to mention one of my favorite details about Jordan’s party was the fabric banner behind the dessert table! I Just loved it! I happened to discover Kat of Underduck on Etsy and instantly knew that I wanted to see about doing a custom banner for Jordan’s birthday party. The banner was so cute and of great quality. Kat is very talented when it comes to creativity with fabric and felt! So if you have little ones with birthdays to celebrate, you have to check out her Etsy shop to see what she can do for you!

Party favors were one of my immediate concerns because I knew there would be a good number of them to make.  I also wanted to stay away from party favors that are easily broken and thrown away the day after the party so I ordered a custom milk/brown chocolate bars from the Philippines and I baked 160+ homemade sugar cookies. I had a custom cookie cutter made and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I packed some animal crackers for the kids and created a custom topper for each bag. I also put together some favor bags for the kids and put plastic plates, bowls, cups with safari animal designs and a box of safari animal puzzle.

I also thought it would be nice to personalize the bottled waters.

I designed all the labels and tags using Photoshop CS5 and printed it on a laser printer. All the round labels were hand cut using a 2″ round puncher. All card stocks were purchased at the craft stores (JoAnn Fabrics & Michael’s).

Overall, I was pretty happy with how everything turned out. A lot of people asked me how did I find time to do all that? Well, let’s just say that I have a passion to create special memories for my son and for our family.

by Joy in Birthdays, Celebrations, Party Planning