How to plan a First Birthday Party

Planning and 1st birthday shouldn't be stressful or expensive. Whose going to remember this more? You or your special little birthday boy/girl.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• invites
• theme
• coffee
• cake/cupcakes
• camera

1. Get your invitee list together. The most important people to invite are your family. It gets hard to weed out the friends you want to invite without feeling like you are going to hurt their feelings. Keep the list to a minimum. This is a time for you to celebrate the life of your baby. Unfortunately, they aren't going to remember any of it.

2. Food:
   Think desert! If you want to keep this short and sweet, coffee and cake is perfect. To make it even less time consuming, that is if you are making the the desert on your own, aim for cupcakes! Everyone gets the same amount, and your little one can be as messy as they want with their own personal cake.

3. Theme:
   Your theme should remind you of what your little one loves most, animals, bubbles, balls. I had a perfect theme for my little one, she loved animals so I headed to the dollar store bought a bag of plastic animals, decorated all the cupcakes with the animals and went with a zoo type theme. She loved it and was able to play with the plastic animals later on.

4. Pictures:
   Take lots of pictures, remember this day and remember how easy and stress-free it was. As they get older they'll have time to celebrate with big parties and actually remember them. Thinking back to it, I remember my first real birthday party at 5. I even remember up to the details of opening my first pretend Doctors Bag.

5. Cleaning Up:
   Unless you want your guests to stay long, start cleaning up when you feel its time to depart. Usually guests will get the hint and start leaving, its an easy get out of jail free card.

[Mommieoftwo]

on 9/25/2008 Thanks for the information, I found it very helpful.