The 1st Birthday: Winter ONEderland

Last Saturday, we celebrated our baby girl’s 1st Birthday with 70 of her closest family members and friends!!!  The party took me literally months to plan, but it was well worth all of the effort (and a lot of fun planning it too!)… Although I try to keep her off the blog for privacy’s sake, I did want to share all of the decorations & décor with you all

 

You can check out my Pinterest Winter ONEderland board to see a lot of my inspiration…

 

Her gorgeous cake was even prettier and more perfect than I could have imagined!

Her pink sparkling snowy smash cake was beautiful as well!

Yes, I know I am nuts… I made a tutu for her high chair   I also lined her high chair & the hardwood floor with a trash bag just in case she got a bit messy!

Since it was a pink penguin / winter ONEderland theme, we had giant snowflakes (aka “pom poms") floating in each corner of the rooms… Fishing wire (along with tulle) became my favorite things in the world this week… My mom had fun helping me hang these pom poms haha

 

Emily received a few penguin ornaments for Christmas and I wanted to incorporate them into the décor without getting lost so we simply tied tulle around our lampshades and hung the ornaments for a subtle touch (since everything else was not so subtle!)…

I made all of the decorations & banners except for this gorgeous banner that I ordered from Etsy from the Pinwheel Lane shop… it really pulled the whole sweets table together!

I made the cupcakes (but the penguin fondant toppers were from ClineffsConfections on Etsy), cake pops, and marshmellow pops and was able to pick up the penguins and pink themed candy (since Valentine’s Day is around the corner!)… the kids (and some adults) loved filling a bag on their way out with goodies to take home with them!  

We also had a penguin piñata for the kiddies to smash in our basement (aka the igloo lounge)!

This (besides the Happy Birthday Emily banner) was my favorite decoration!  I order all of Emily’s tutus from Gaga For Bows on Etsy but I recently found out how to make my own and decided to make a tutu wreath for our front door so our guests would be received with a snowy pink welcome!  I made it several weeks ago and had it hanging out our basement door… Emily loved it and would constantly point to it and giggle so needless to say, it is now back to residing on our basement door… I am not sure if we will ever be able to take it down

For the favors, we did an “Adoption Center” where each kid could adopt a penguin of their choosing (we had pink, blue, orange, green, black, gray, and white) to take home and take care of… this seemed to be a huge hit, especially with the little kiddies, although a few left theirs behind by accident, so if anyone is missing theirs, let me know, we have a few extra!

I thought I got to take pictures of everything, but realized I missed the “drink room”… We had the drinks set up in our laundry room…. We had pink penguin punch, which was a homemade sangria… melted ice (water)… juice boxes, soda, iced tea, and frosty drinks (beer) as well… We went thru 4 gallons of sangria – it was definitely the drink of choice for the “big adult” penguins

The newborn thru 12 months banner was another one of my favorite decorations and super easy to make too!  It was really neat to reflect back on each month of her life and see how she has changed so much!  We also had a slideshow going on the iPad which was set up on our China cabinet so that everyone could see a picture of her each day of her life!

Outdoor penguins greeting our guests!  I painted “1’s” on them with nail polish   It was at this point that I realized I may have gone a little too far… but then the fumes got to me and I remembered that her 1st birthday only happens once!

 

I found this white Christmas tree at Target during Black Friday weekend and was obsessed with using it for the party… I really wished it was pink, but oh well!  For our guestbook, I made a Shutterfly book that has pictures from each month of her first year… there is a blank page for each page of pictures so that our guests could leave a special message… we joked around that we will show her this on her 21st birthday

The present table… before our guests arrived… I actually never got to take a picture of the full presents table but it was jam-packed!  She got a LOT of presents, toys, books, puzzles and clothes!!

My grandmom made these adorable penguins made out of olives & carrots!!!  How awesome are these?!?!

And my MIL made these super cute penguin cookies for the kiddies… so yummy & sweet!  The kids snatched these guys up in their goody bags!

And I of course, have to close with pictures again of my absolute favorite edible part of the entire party:  the cake…

 

Hope you enjoyed my recap of the details of my daughter’s 1st birthday: a pink penguin winter ONEderland!  It took months of planning, but was well worth it!