C's First Birthday Review (Part 2)

October 6th - Family Party

For C's Family Party we had 14 guests (family from both mine and M's).  For some reason I'm crazy and decided to have a sit down dinner.  It was a lot of fun seeing everyone, and nice to have our house feel full.  This is the party I stressed the most about, but had the most fun decorating.  For his theme, we went with Sweet At One Safari Boy Birthday, which is a cute set with baby jungle animals.  We purchased on the products on Amazon.  We purchased the following items:

• Tablecloths
• Lunch Napkins (I ordered a ton of these, so we didn't bother with the smaller matching napkins)
• Dessert Plates (They also have lunch plates, but I decided that paper plates would not withstand dinner).
• Birthday Blowouts - I thought this would be fun for everyone and totally amaze C.  He was pretty enthralled.
• Birthday Banner (This was the only thing I wasn't happy about, the sticker letters for the name we're really hard to peel, and a lot of the letters only had 1 uppercase and 1 lowercase (so if you ripped one, you had to carefully stick it back together).
• Bib-I'm actually pretty impressed with bib.  It's pretty nice quality and washed well (I was worried the screen printing might rub off.  It was probably the priciest thing in the set, but at least C will get lot's of non-birthday uses out of it!

At GFS we purchased blue cocktail napkins, white square cocktail plates, and white square dinner plates to complete the evening.

Now more importantly, the FOOD!  After an extremely long and expensive trip to Giant Eagle, here's what we had -

Appetizers:  Most of these a purchased ready to made (veggie tray, pizza bites, pretzel bites, and eggrolls), I also put together a cheese and cracker plate - with two of my favorite cheeses (stilton with cranberries and double glouchester).  We also made pigs in a blanket (M's favorite) and Figs in a Blanket (from Mark Bittman's Kitchen Express).  The pigs in a blanket turned out pretty well, the Figs in a Blanket not so much.  Figs in a Blanket are wrapped in bacon, which sound delicious, but it is a little greasy.

Dinner: Pot Roast with Cranberries and Glazed Carrots (Mark Bittman's Quick & Easy Recipes), Rosemary Potatoes (One of my dad's recipes), and Easter Egg Bread (made into rolls without Easter Eggs).  The only problem with dinner was that I made way too many potatoes!  My family is English and M's is Irish (so we're all potato fans!), so my dad had suggested 10lbs of potatoes.

Dessert: Cupcakes and a Smash Cake.  I made a variety of cupcakes (mostly box mix and store bought icing), but I did make homemade pumpkin cupcakes, which everyone thought they were delicious - what's the fun in having an October baby if you can't have some pumpkin flavored things at his party!  I have to say, I loved the monkey cupcake liners I purchased.  They were the Reynolds StayBrite baking cups, they really did hold shape well, they didn't get transparent like other liners, and they gave the perfect cupcake shape.  I highly recommend them! C's smash cake was a monkey to continue the safari theme.  I baked a small cake in the 4 inch cake pan, and then sliced a cupcake in half for ears.  The dark brown icing is chocolate, the light is the cinnamon icing from the pumpkin cupcakes, and I used a dab of strawberry icing for the tongue, and chocolate chips/sprinkles for the rest!


Lastly, C was spoiled with tons of toys, clothes, and books from our families.  Some highlights were a drum, a tunnel, a rocking "bug",  a bear that sings Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (which C loves, he almost always calms down when it starts!), playtime peekaboo book (it pops up!), Blue's Clue's DVDs, and a Pitt colored sweater.  Everything our families brought were amazing and perfect for C, we're blessed to have two supportive families who love to spoil C!

October 10th - Baby Friends Party

For C's little friends we had a party at Fun Buy The Pound on a Wednesday night.  It was by far the easiest, most relaxed party.  We ordered sandwiches and chicken fingers from East Coast Sandwiches for dinner.  The food was tasty - I love the chicken fingers!  We let all the little ones run around in both the playground and the baby room, it was really nice having the whole store to ourselves!  After a bit of playing we had cupcakes, that I ordered from Paddy Cake Bakery, I love their cake and they did a really cute job decorating C's special cake!