Top Photo: Thank You Bowl
Bottom Left: Center Piece jars
Bottom Right: Hand Made goodie bags! 🙂
 Birthday Parties are full of fun, from the decorations to games and cake. However, sometimes for a one year old they are everything but fun. It’s easy for your little one to get overwhelmed with birthday parties, especially if they are not around a lot of people every day. I think that when it comes to the first birthday party, the parents are more excited! 🙂 I have been planning my daughter’s birthday for months now. It’s been such a blast! This is my first daughter so everything is so new to me. Although for my son’s birthday’s I do go all out, but I have learned how to be more effective when Birthday Party Planning. Depending on your theme or what you are planning to do it takes a lot of effort and money. I am going to share a few things I did to help make planning easy and cost efficient.Â
           Get Organized: Since I am very detailed oriented, I like notes, reminders, and schedules to help me plan events and without them I am lost. This has helped me a lot in my planning process for example, I have a notebook where I write down my ideas and guest list. This is very helpful because it helps me keep track of people coming to the party. I also created a file on my computer for ideas I had for decorations, invites, and cake. This helps give me a picture of what I want.Â
           Do-it-yourself projects: These are great ideas for parties and are really cost efficient, just remember that these projects can be time consuming and may cost you if you are lacking supplies. My husband created the invitations for the party, and to print and mail them was $30.00. They came out super cute and were very inexpensive. Another thing is to make your own “goodie bags”. I went to party city and I bought White and Pink plain gift bags, $10.00 each and I decorated them with stickers, ribbon, and Card Stock paper. I also made different bags for boys and girls.  You can also make your own centerpieces, most of the supplies for this I was able to get at the Dollar tree. I also used Card Stock paper to help design the jars I bought this paper at Michael’s for $3.00.  Most of my ideas were from Pinterest and Etsy, I just put my own spin on the idea to make it my own. In total for decorations and invitations, I spent about $80.00.Â
           Food: When your hosting an event food is always important. There are plenty of ways to stretch your buck and have great food at the same time. I ordered Sandwiches by the foot from Wal-Mart, they are only $28.00 and they come prepared with meat and cheese condiments come on the side. You can also make your side dishes rather than buying them, this is great especially if you are going to have more than thirty people, and you will spend less at the checkout. Wal-Mart also has a nice bakery, where they will prepare specialty cakes for you and they are very inexpensive starting at $48.00 for a tier cake. You can order whatever you want or can afford.Â
           Games and Prizes: I always like to have games for the kids that attend my parties. You can do simple games, from pin the tail on the donkey, musical chairs, races, or water balloon tosses. Whichever you chose make it fun and exciting for the kids involved. This year for my daughter’s party I am doing a water balloon toss, and 3 leg race. I went a bought some small yet cute prizes. I am also going to print blank pictures of her and have a “coloring station” for the kids.Â
           Whatever you decide to do, just make sure to enjoy the process. Remember your child’s birthday only comes once a year. It’s exciting but it can also come with stress, stay calm and try to relax. Reach out for help if and when you need it and do your best for your kids. If possible, always try to plan events in advance, when you do this it really helps alleviate some of your stress. I am attaching some pictures of things I made and I will make sure to post some pictures on my facebook page of the party.Â
           Thanks for stopping by mommies, share your story by connecting with my here on my blog or on facebook. So that together we can strive for mommy success! 🙂
Wow! The planning sounds exhausting. I know this is a Mommy site, but as a daddy of three (3) and having sponsored dozens of party’s I couldnt resist the temptation on weighing in on this topic. I believe that a birthday celebration is a powerful way to not only celebrate the special day of a loved one but it is a powerful element to the building of a family community. While the obvious is obvious, we enjoy food, cake, and presents but we must not overlook and seize the moment to enjoy the company of those that are in our immediate support network or community. We must take this opportunity to nurture those relationships in the middle of what can sometimes be chaos which leads me to my point the element missing above is to make sure and thank each and everyone who attends the celebration and when possible to plan future events. Thoughts??
Thank you so much for your feedback and for visiting successfulmommyadvice.com! As always, daddies are always welcomed to chime in on topics. I agree with all that you stated above, giving thanks and getting family/friends together is a very important element when throwing parties. I really wanted to touch on the planning aspect of parties. Just because I have been able to see first hand with having two little ones, how expensive, time consuming, and overwhelming the planning process is. Although it is fun and exciting, it’s also work. I wanted to provide ideas and tools for the process of party planning, as women/mommies we just want our child’s day to be filled with fun and excitement and will always do our best to do so. So to touch on your topic of “thanks” when I have parties, I like to give “Thank you” cards or something to show my appreciation for my guests’ attendance. Once again, thanks for stopping by and for more topics like this and others, sign up by entering your email address to receive my monthly newsletter and more! 🙂