Up Up and Away! Hot Air Balloon 1st Birthday Party

Disclosure- This post is littered with 1st birthday-ness and pictures and ideas ad nausea. If you are climbing what feels to be an insurmountable peek of Mount Babyless, I get it. How about you start at this post first or just wait till our next blog posts.

Many of you have been asking for Jellybean updates. I promise she exists! Really, it is because this past year has flown by so fast that it has been hard to take it all in. I want to savor the smells, the sounds, the snuggles and bottle them up to remember always. I refused to miss a moment of her life. Hell, it took nearly a decade to have her, so instead of rushing the clock and fretting about when she will sit up, crawl, walk and talk we have just focused on being parents, loving and enjoying her in the moment.

Over the years we have thrown an array of different events from a “FU Uterus Party”  to “Sperm and Egg Cookie Decorating gathering”  and let us not forget our quite revealing “Sex  Party”  (not the kind that you throw your keys in the fish bowl, come on people, get your mind out of the gutter!) When it came time to start planning a first birthday well, I didn’t even know where to start.

I mean, I never thought I would get this far. Nor did I know how to plan a 1^st birthday, as we, for the most part avoided them like we would baby showers. It was quite obvious that Chris and I did not know the first thing about throwing a party for the kiddos. Now, you can’t really entertain kids with nice frothy glass of beer or a heavy handed pour of wine. Perhaps it would be in bad taste to just liter the play area with goldfish crackers and puffs and hope that keeps the minis happily busy for the time being. The point is, this was certainly uncharted waters for us. So, I did what any new mom would do, scoured Pinterest and channeled my inner creativity.

Pinterestingly enough, I started to collect ideas to make this day memorable. A few folks told us, “ah don’t make a big deal out of her first birthday, she’ll never remember it.” Well, WE will so that counts right? I kid I kid. I knew in my mind what I wanted, which was to match the theme of Jellybeans hot air balloon themed nursery.

Now, of course I wanted to have an all-out soiree, you know fireworks, dancing monkeys with tiny red hats a unicorn petting zoo, but we were also on a budget since we were still recouping from our surrogacy costs from a year ago.

{SHAKING FISTS} Damn you expensive out-of-pocket infertility costs! Damn you!!

So here are a few pictures from our EPIC “Up Up and Away! Hot Air Balloon 1^st Birthday Party”.

ESTY had so many cute first birthday outfits but this one stood out. I had asked the shop owner if she could do a custom request and match Jellybeans nursery colors and she happily said yes! SCORE.

Chris and I will be writing about this AMAZING organization in a completely separate post in a few weeks. (I recently had a chance to interview the Founder and She-ro.) That’s all I have to say…SHE-RO.  Instead of presents, we asked our guests that if they still feel compelled to bring something, that we were collecting donations of new PJs and books for the Pajama Program which provides a new set of PJs and a book for those kids who are suddenly placed in temporary care of the foster care system. Just this small gesture, allows a small amount of comfort in such an uncertain situation for this children.

Remember when I said we were on a budget? Well, I snatched up a hot air balloon and cloud stamp set off of… you guessed it, ETSY and we stamped plain cheap paper bags for the favors, the invite envelopes and on the food cards for a custom look that matched the theme.

**Side note, I would have linked this shop and the shop for the 1st birthday outfit but both are ironically either out of stock or temporarily closed?** So I suggest still going on ETSY if you are looking for this and you should find something comparable.

I know I know… Damn Candace. You could have fixed the spacing on the picture and the frame. Well, I bought the frames from the dollar store thinking that would fit the frame. The day of the party, I tried to sausage the paper into the frame and well, this is the result. The lessoned learned here is bring the print out with you. K? Moving on…

PINK POPCORN!! or “Sunset Popcorn” to go with our theme. This was stupid easy and cheap to make: 2 boxes of store brand Kettle corn. POP and throw into a bowl. Eat a handful. In a double boiler melt 2 bags of pink melt-aways. Pour the it all over the popcorn, spread out on a cookie sheet lined with parchment and sprinkle with pink sugar sprinkles and white perils <-white sprinkles.  BAM! Insta-favor. Oh, and you can make this up to a week before your party, just be sure to keep it in an air tight bag.

This chalkboard “selfie-kit” I snatched this up from our craft store for  75% off and it is reusable. Plus, who doesn’t like a “Selfie- Station”? That’s right you guessed it Commies anti-animal lovers. I kid. I actually hold the title of “World’s Worst Selfie Taker.”

Blue/Teal punch. This was taken actually before the “clouds” were added. Basically it is Lemon-lime soda, Blue Hawaiian Punch and a few scoops of pineapple sherbet.

I made a Puff Bar for the wee-babes! Jellybean has a lot of  miracle baby friends so best make sure they had some Puffs!

 
This was our time capsule and memory poster table.

 

 

 

 

 

Remember earlier in this post when I said that there were a few people that said Jellybean will never remember her 1st birthday? Well this maybe true, kinda… but not so much. I found this mini suit case at a crafts store (50% off!) and in it, I added her birthday invite, favor bag, a trinket from what we did as a family on her actual birthday, newspaper and a few other items. I also printed out some lined paper balloons and had our guests fill out a note or words of wisdom for Jellybean to open her time capsule and read her notes on her 18th birthday.

This part was tough and presented a challenge. We did not have a lot of time or money to make a creatively unique food spread. It had to please the masses and be easy to assemble. The fun part was naming the food. For example, how do you make fruit salad go with the theme? Well, we put on the card, “It’s a bird, it’s a plane NOPE. Just Fruit Salad.”  You get the point.

 

 

 

 

 

We made, well “WE” as in Chris, made meringue cookies and Jello Parfaits. Click on the links for the recipes. I recommend cooking the cookies a little longer and a box of Jello for the parfaits does not make a lot, so buy a few boxes. The  tray in the above picture was 2 boxes worth.

Cost cutting tip- Make your own cupcakes and smash cake. We made cupcakes for the crowd, thanks to Mrs. Betty Crocker.  Chris made a mini smash cake, again Thank you Mrs. Box Cake Mix. It just looks fancy because we have icing tips and YouTubed how to do a rose icing pattern.

This was right before Jellybean decided she hated, no actually she LOATHED cake. We ended up giving her blueberries which made all things right again.

I had racked my brain for so long trying to decide what I should do to provide entertainment to the mini-humans that would come to this shindig. Here is what I came up with: craft tables. We had a baby print station, a coloring station and a bubble station, because every kid and adult loves bubbles.

We repurposed Jellybean’s toy basket and made it into a hot air balloon party prop!

 

We also used some of the party decorations for her 1st birthday photo shoot. Jellybean hated the cake the first time and she REALLY hated it second time around. Which  I am OK with!

So note to us: cake brings out the inner baby Bruce Banner in the bean.

I would like to say a special thank you to our INCREDIBLE photographer Ashley Whitlow. She did an amazing job on all of our pictures and I just heart her vision and ability to capture life!

She even wrote a  blog post about our photo session!