Baby's FIRST Birthday Party Planning

Our Baby turns One year old on June 8th and this weekend we are having her party. I'm super happy that I had ZERO appointments book this Saturday because that gives me time to get things ready. Normally, I would panic being a start up business and no appointments on the busiest day of the week usually. But today, I am thankful.

So, our theme is an outdoor baby water park- we have a kiddie pool and a really cool wild sprinkler and slip and slide. We have kids of all ages showing up, so we wanted to be able to accommodate everyone. We'll have a hot dog "bar" with lots of toppings. But- I really wanted to do something kind of cute and girlie since it's my baby girls FIRST.

My theme: Mermaids/ Flip Flop tea party. I bought a dozen rubber duckies that were in Mermaid costumes from orientaltrading.com and I bought a wooden mermaid that I colored and am putting as the cake topper. From there, the waves will get rockier on my blue iced cake and go into a cinnamon crumb beach topping. Of course my beach cake will be centered with a mermaid, but will have candy fish in the waves and teddy grahams laying on their fruit roll up towels in the sand (see pics).

I also did a craft that I saw online with nutter butter cookies and some gel frosting to make tiny flip flop cookies (see pics).

My biggest shabang however, is the birthday bathing suit and one year hat I got. I had all these bathing suits that were for 3-6 months. Since my expectant baby is due in October, we figured those little bathing suits will not fit either girls anymore, so I took them to a baby boutique and traded them for the cutest bright yellow one piece with built in tutu. It was adorable. Then, I stopped at Michaels craftstore during the soccer tournament in Medford and got scrap booking paper to match and a stran of maribou. With my hotglue gun I created a birthday hat to match!

As I've said before Im totally a wanna be domestic diva. I only get a chance to do creative, amazing things on special occasions- not on a regular basis. Its those few times a year that I get my creativity out!

All my crafts I did for very inexpensive since I had most of the stuff laying around: cake batter, frosting, frosting gel, etc. I also traded some already existing stuff for new stuff at 2nd hand stores, so it was a wash. I grabbed a big piece of cardboard from work and painted it like a surf board- stuck it in the front lawn and wrote "Party in back" so I didnt have to have people trample through my house. I also bought buns and hot dogs when they went on sale during memorial day and froze them until the party.

Its my attempt to be thrifty yet still throw a great party! Hope you enjoy the crafting tips...