Forest's First Birthday Halloween Bash!

Hey guys! I feel like my head is still spinning from the vacation and big birthday celebration last week. The time change and Forest cutting his upper molars and canines hasn’t helped much either. I’m not sleeping very well and my head feels fuzzy and chaotic. Such is motherhood sometimes! 

Anyways, my goal is to blog about Forest’s actual birthday, his birthday party and our vacation all in the next week or so. While most of his naps haven’t been long enough to allow for much down time, every once in a while he’ll throw me a 2 hour snooze where I can actually drink a cuppa tea and start to form coherent sentences. Now appears to be one of those naps so let’s do this thing! I figured I’d start the blogfest with laying out his party details. 

When Forest went a week past his due date of October 23^rd, I started to get really panicked that he would be born on Halloween. I have never ever never enjoyed Halloween. When I was a small kid, my brother dressed at Freddy Krueger and the night has terrified me ever since. Then when I hit my late elementary years my family went on a Southern Baptist Halloween boycott so I was always at the church Fall Fest while my catholic compadres were out stuffing their faces with candy. Then once I got to college, my modest nature was always a bit uncomfortable with the skimpy Halloween costumes seen at all the frat houses. I just felt like a huge dork and generally chose to call it a night pretty early and praised the morning of Nov 1 when Halloween was behind me for another year. 

So when I was induced in the wee morning hours of Oct 30, I started to get really anxious that I would have a long labor (not unusual for first time moms) and my son would be burdened with my least favorite holiday as his birthday. As it happened, he was born super quickly, and ended up being born on the morning of October 30^th, which I LOVE because it’s also my dad’s birthday. 

Birthday buddies.

Anyhoo, that was a really long way to say that now that I have a baby, Halloween has a totally different meaning to me. 

I see the fun in children dressing up and walking their neighborhood with their friends. I hope to now replace my bad memories of Halloween with happy memories of Forest celebrating the holiday that falls so closely to his birthday. Plus, Halloween makes a super easy and fun birthday party theme! I love that it's fun for all the kiddos, and not just the birthday boy. 

We decided to go low key with the first birthday and just threw a play-date sort of shindig with Forest’s best baby buddies. These were the invites his friends received in the mail. 

Source for invites

When our guests showed up they were greeted with a collage of photos of Forest in the shape of a 1. 

I was self-conscious that my collage looked a bit like a 7 but Jon assured me that our guests would know that this was Forest’s first birthday, not his 7^th. But just to be sure, we stenciled the number 1 onto the pumpkins anchoring the balloons in the archway. 

Real men help craft for their baby's birthday party.

Of course, I guess people could have interpreted that as Forest turning 11(…or 17…or 71…or 77). I found jack o latern balloons at Target so we tied those along with solid purple and green balloons to the pumpkin stems in the entry way. The left over balloons went on Forest’s highchair.  

I also made another homage to Forest’s first year by making a banner of his monthly portraits to hang in the play room. 

I backed the pictures with various Halloween themed scrap book paper and then attached them to Halloween ribbons. 

I think it looked nice and was a great way to use those monthly photo shoot pictures. I probably took over 5,000 pictures of Forest in his first year (and really that might be a gross under-exaggeration)  so between the 1 collage and the monthly banner I’m glad I at least got to utilize about 40 of them. Plus this is a simple and inexpensive way to decorate.

I also really wanted to have a chalkboard poster for him. I found a great one on this etsy shop in the perfect color scheme. Of course, I froze up when ordering it when it came to listing 4-6 things Forest loves. I just couldn’t think of a concise way to say ‘Forest loves standing up in the cart while shopping at Target’ so I just put ‘shopping’. 

SOURCE for poster

Unfortunately that became the most prominant focal point for that particular subset which my husband was not so happy about. Ah well….I guess I could have put ‘shopping carts’. Hindsight is 20/20. I still love his poster and I love that he loves shopping at Target:)

For other decorations, we mainly used the super inexpensive but very festive balloons-and-streamer idea in the party color scheme.

It was very simple and was an easy way to dress up the house. My Mother-in-Law (MIL) and I did a special streamer backdrop over the mantle with some pumpkins to try to provide a good place to take Halloween pics of the babies. 

My goal was to get a picture of each of the babies in front of it, but once the party started it was way too chaotic for all of that. I think we had 13 babies in total. 13 babies! It was madness! But in an adorable-overload sort of way. 

9 1/2 of the babies who attended. I love how they are almost all teething in this pic;)

The party was at lunch time so we decided to serve finger sandwiches and have a veggie tray and some other fruit and finger food options before the smash cake celebration. I had seen an idea on pinterest to use cookie cutters to make Halloween shaped sandwiches and decided to cut my chicken salad and brie and cranberry sandwiches into pumpkins. 

For another Halloween touch, I made ‘ghost’ strawberries by dipping them in white chocolate and drawing ghost faces with black icing. 

Unfortunately the icing tip I had was a bit too wide to offer the proper precision, so they didn’t turn out so well, but they tasted delicious! That's all that matters, right?

As another snack, my MIL helped me make these pumpkin pretzles I saw on Pinterest. 

They were VERY messy, but pretty simple. You just melt white chocolate and color it with gel food coloring to make it orange. Once you dip the pretzels, you add a green mini-M&M for the stem and then cool them in the fridge for about 20 minutes and you're done!

We also made these Hershey Hugs/Candy Corn pretzels which I have done before in different color varieties for different holidays. 

All you do is pre-heat your oven to 250 F, line a cookie sheet with wax paper and place your mini-pretzels in a single layer on the cookie sheet. Then place a hershey’s hug (or kiss…or rolo…the possibilities are endless) on each pretzel before placing them in the oven for about 4 minutes. Then take them out and squash your chosen chocolate with a topping candy or nut. I thought the candy corn made a nice tie-in to Halloween for this occasion, but I’ve done Christmas or Valentine’s M&Ms and my friend Jillian makes them with rolo’s and pecans (Jon’s favorite combo). 

It’s a simple concept, adaptable for any occasion, and always a major hit! 

I didn’t want to stress myself by trying to make a smash cake and 2 dozen cupcakes the morning of the party so I decided to outsource from Old Towne Danville Bakery. 

They did an excellent job with Forest’s Jack-o-Latern smash cake and the coordinating Halloween cupcakes were as yummy as they were cute. 

Forest’s smash cake chair was decorated with balloons and a fabric banner I made in the color scheme of his party. 

You can read about that crafting adventure here. For the smashing of the cake, we changed him out of his pumpkin costume an into his Chippendale outfit of an orange diaper cover and Orange and Black chevron-striped bow tie and suspenders that I found on this etsy shop. . 

SOURCE

The cuteness was a bit over the top. Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of him in his smash cake get-up before the actual smashing but trust me, it was too stinkin' cute. It’s probably best that I didn’t get a photo or else there might be a baby boom in about 9 months from now.

Forest reacted much in the way we expected him too. He was a bit self-conscious with everyone staring at him so at first he quietly and confusedly poked at the pumpkin in front of him. 

We started handing out cupcakes to all the guests so that he didn’t feel so much pressure. Then we tore off a small piece of the cake and fed it to him, and it didn’t take him long to figure it out after that. 

He was classically stuffing handfuls into his mouth and having a jolly good time. 

His favorite part was probably smashing the cake into his daddy’s face though. He thought that was a real hoot.  

He made a fantastic mess so Jonathan had to give him a full on bath before returning him into his pumpkin costume. 

Once the smash cake was demolished, the party started dwindling down as all the babies headed home for their afternoon nap. We weren’t sure if Forest would snooze or not after all the cake but he surprised us with taking an extra-long nap that afternoon, which was great because we were all pretty worn out! After his nap, we helped him to open his presents from his baby friends and quickly decided that we never need to buy him another toy again! Seriously, he is set for life! Especially since he had another onslaught of gifts from his family. Boy is totally spoiled already.

Well that about sums up the big 1^st birthday party! It was so much fun and I can’t believe it’s over and my baby is a toddler!! Here are a few more pictures from the day. 

I plan on posting about his actual birthday festivities and our vacation next week. Stay tuned!