A Dinosaur Birthday Party

We finally had Isaiah's birthday party after postponing it due to Isaiah being sick and our niece being in the hospital. Hence the reason I haven't been posting much...life has been crazy! But all the party prep was worth it because we had a blast celebrating our little guy turning 1.

I decided on a dinosaur theme which was tons of fun to play with. I made his card (and matching Thank You cards) based on the green fellow in this picture I found:

Amazingly enough, I did that dinosaur totally free-hand. And trust me, I am no artist! I usually bust out my Cricut (and did for other parts of the party prep - see dinosaurs on banner) but decided to give this one a go without it. I am pretty pleased with how it turned out!

I wanted to make a banner for the party and had been brainstorming for sometime without settling on anything I really liked. Then I happened to stumble upon an easy adorable banner idea over at Small Fry & Co (banner post here). I had all the supplies necessary to make it so I sat down and got it done in one night. I just glued everything together instead of sewing for sake of time but I think the sewing looks really cute too. I decided to just do his name so that I could reuse the banner as decoration in his room.

Because we usually only invite a few close family members to our kids' birthdays, we don't have a lot of little kids besides our own and our nieces in attendance. For this reason, I decided to pass on traditional party favors and make each of the bigger kids something special in honor of the party theme. Dinosaur tails! I got the idea for this over at Running with Scissors (dinosaur tail post here). Can you tell I love scouring blogs for creative ideas? I saw these tails and fell instantly in love. My boys and my niece love all things dress-up so this was the perfect gift both for sporting at the party and for wearing over and over when the need to be a dinosaur arises.

Finally, we had the dessert. Nathan and Jordan helped me make dinosaur sugar cookies:

 Typically I make our boys their own smash cake for the first birthday and make something separate for everyone else. As the party grew closer I realized that the cake planning was starting to stress me out so I decided to go with cupcakes instead. I made a mix of Jumbo and mini cupcakes, decorated in green and red. With my husband's help, we used the cupcakes to create a dinosaur that was fun and easy. I am pretty pleased with how it turned out and I think Isaiah was plenty happy with his first icing experience!

 All in all we had a great time celebrating Isaiah's first birthday...dinosaur style:)