The Party

I have received several requests for pictures from the party, so…here goes! Sadly, my camera was on manual when I handed it off, so most of the pictures of our guests came out blurry, and I am still waiting on pictures from some friends who were playing photographer as well.

When we started planning Jacob’s third and Lilian’s first birthday party, I really wanted to do them separately. After giving it a bit more thought as much as I wanted to make each of their parties special and uniquely theirs, it didn’t make much sense to host two parties a week apart with the exact same guest list.  Once we decided to combine them I set out to find a theme that would work for both of them.  Jacob was very adamant about wanting a scoop party, but I of course wanted something a bit more girly for Lilian’s first birthday celebration.  I finally decided that flowers or ladybugs could tie-in nicely to the dirt in Jacob’s construction theme and found someone to create the invitations for me.  After some back-and-forth, this is what we came up with:

Our guests were greeted by a door sign as they arrived, and by lots of balloons as they entered the mudroom.  I failed to get a picture of the balloons…

Like we did for Jacob’s party, I wanted to display pictures of Lilian throughout her first year. Of course, if we were going to display pictures of Lilian, we had to do the same for Jacob, right?  So, I bought unfinished frames from Michael’s and painted them pink, green and yellow, and then added some white Ikea frames that I haven’t used yet to round out the displays.  Lilian’s display was set-up on the playroom mantle:

And Jacob’s in the family room:

Sadly, we ran out of time and didn’t get Jacob’s poms hung in time, so I just scattered them on top of his frames. I also made a few picture banners with shots we took of both kids together over the past year.

Thanks to my brilliant sister we settled on the idea of a build your own taco bar for food, playing on the construction theme. In addition to grilled chicken and pulled pork, we served black bean confetti salad, mango and pineapple salsa, chips with red and green salsas, guacamole, two kinds of cheese, lettuce and tomato.  The taco bar was complemented with mac and cheese bites, fruit skewers, a veggie tray with creamy jalepeno (a la Chuy’s),

and an idea that was much more successful in concept than in execution: turkey and cheese sandwiches cut in the shape of scoops and ladybugs.

The sweets table showcased two flavors of cupcakes – vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream frosting and chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream, cheesecake stuffed strawberries and oreo truffles.

I also added the cookie favors, to keep them from tempting little fingers before it was time to pass them out!

Flanking the dessert table were birthday banners for each of our guests of honor.

When it came time to sing Happy Birthday, Jacob may have been slightly excited for his cupcake…

Sweet, goofy little boy.

Lilian chilaxing while her guests sang to her…

When she figured out what we had put on her tray, I think she was worried we wouldn’t let her keep it and so she tried to shove the entire cupcake in her mouth at once!

Eventually she realized that we were going to let her keep it and began to eat at a more leisurely pace. And made a proper mess!

Lilian with Mom

And one with Dad, too.

Sadly, we didn’t get a picture of either Keith or me with the birthday boy because we couldn’t get him to hold still for that long, but we did manage a picture of all four of us.

We couldn’t have pulled it off without the help of Grammy (who helped with the food preparation and cleaned up almost single-handedly!), and my sweet friend Lori who put together the highchair banner and made lots of tissue poms.

We were so happy with the way everything turned out and very grateful to all of our sweet friends and family that came out to make Jacob and Lilian feel so loved!