Birthday Parties - The Very First One

I'm always looking for new ideas for my sons' birthday parties. To complicate matters, we live in an apartment too small to hold all the friends and family that want to help us celebrate, we have a very tight, small budget, and both our children were born in months prone to random bursts of foul weather. I figure we're not the only family in this situation, so for the next few posts I thought I'd share of few of the party plans we've managed to pull off, what mistakes we've made, and a few of the ideas I've got up my sleeve for the future.


The Very First Birthday Party

For our eldest son's first birthday we expected (and received) about 25 guests. So we chose a nearby park with it's wide-open spaces and kid-friendly playground for our location. I decided on a 123's, ABC's, and Elmo theme with primary colors.

Since tables at this particular park were inconveniently located on the opposite side of the large bathroom building from the playground, we chose to borrow a folding table from my husband's grandmother and set up our party area, complete with pop-up canopy, on a patch of grass near the playground.

Since the ages of our guests ranged from 1 to 92, we planned a variety of entertainment. First and foremost we had the playground nearby for the oldest children (6 yrs). We also had a large tarp laid out under the canopy for the littlest ones to crawl on and arranged the chairs in a U-shape around the canopy with an opening toward the playground. To help keep the little ones entertained and to really emphasize our theme, I spray painted 2 large boxes (previous to the party, of course) to look like old-school alphabet & number building blocks. I taped the two boxes together end-to-end creating a tunnel which, to our surprise, all the children LOVED, including the 6 year old. In fact, they spent as much time chasing each other through that little cardboard tunnel as they did on the playground. Another big hit with the kids was our bubble machine which we picked up at Toys R Us for about $15 and set up at the back of our party area (opposite the playground) where there was plenty of room to run and most importantly where the wind blew the bubbles away from party guests & our food.

For the adults we played two pen and paper games. The first game was a fill-in-the-blank story of the birthday boy's life. Everyone had great fun trying to remember how much he weighed when he was born, how old he was when he got his first tooth, what his first word was, and more! We gave a small gift to the person with the most correct answers. The second game was a pass-it-along drawing game where everyone had 20 seconds to start drawing a portrait of the birthday boy and at the end of that 20 seconds they passed their picture to the left and then tried to complete the picture handed to them by the person on their right. We did about 5 passes for a total of 2 minutes drawing time. The results were comical! We had everyone vote on the best picture which we then kept to put in our son's baby book.

For the cake we ordered a standard sheet cake from Costco for about $16. Then we added some rubber figures of Elmo, Erny, & Cookie Monster to tie in our theme and finished it off with candles shaped like crayons.

For food & drinks we offered: lemonade, water, and a variety of 2-liter sodas; crackers, chips, apples, and a variety of homemade sandwiches. Of course we had Elmo plates and cups which also featured numbers & letters in primary colors (also picked up at Toys R Us).

We did forget the camera, so at the last second my husband had to run back to the apartment to get it and arrived back at the park about 20 minutes after the rest of the guests had arrived and as if that weren't bad enough, we grossly underestimated how long it would take to set up and I didn't finish setting up until about the time my husband returned with the camera. However, once set up was complete and the camera retrieved, everything went smoothly and no one seemed to mind the delayed start- a couple even pitched in to help get things done. All in all it was a great party and everyone seemed to have a great time.

My next post will be about the birthday party that almost didn't happen. In the meantime, I'd love to read any comments, ideas, or birthday related stories you may have to tell. Just click on the comments link to share!