5 Unique First Birthday Party Ideas

Baby A turned 1 earlier this year and has now become a toddler, well and truly (he started walking just after his birthday) and at 16 months he’s running around all over the place.  I miss having babies, but I do love this stage when they’re so curious and funny!  Anyway, I digress!  After A’s 1st birthday party we had several lovely comments about the things we chose to help celebrate A’s first birthday, so I thought I would share some of these ideas here with my lovely blog readers.

1. Monthly Baby Photo Banner.  I first made this for O almost 4 years ago now (sob, how are my boys getting so big, so quickly!) after spotting a picture on Pinterest, printing out a black and white photo of his face from each month since he was born.  Then printing out a birthday hat graphic, cutting out and sticking a hat onto each photo of O.  I then taped each of the faces onto some string and hung on the wall.  It looked fab!  You could really see how his face changed over his first 12 months of his life (A’s didn’t look quite as impressive as his face hasn’t changed a huge amount at all!!).

2.  Watermelon Cake.  As simple as it sounds!  I don’t like giving my boys cake when they were only just one (although I do love the look of those cake smash photos!!), for various reasons, so this watermelon cake was perfect for us.  Cut a couple of tiers of watermelon (1 or 2 melons depending on size) and then use skewers and cocktail sticks to secure other fruit onto the ‘cake’.  We used cookie cutters to cut out shapes to put on the cake too.  I was slightly concerned that the older kids might be disappointed that there was no proper cake, but they didn’t care and loved the melon cake!

3.  Felt Crown.  I love cute photos with handmade items.  This felt crown was so easy to make and looked great on A too.  Simply cut out a crown shape from felt, measure it around your child head and cut it so there is a 1 – 2 cm gap at the back of the head.  Sew on an embellishment at the front and close the gap at the back with a short piece of elastic to secure the crown on your child’s head.  Make sure you measure it on your child’s head while making it, otherwise it won’t fit well!

4.  Puzzles/colouring sheets for older kids.  We’ve had a few older kids at both first birthday’s and so we had to make sure we had something for them to do.  At A’s party we made a hunt the animal game, with pictures of animals around the house and a tick sheet to try and find each picture.

5.  Cookie Cutter Food.  I love to make the party food look amazing and one simple trick is to use cookie cutters, suitable to whichever theme we’re going with.  We’ve had bugs, trains, woodland and going for a space theme for O’s next party.  Cutters can be used for biscuits, sandwiches, melon slices, cake and even as a template for bunting pictures!

What have you done/are you going to do for your kids 1st birthday’s?

J x