When it comes to baby stuff, I love...
love...monsters. The proof is in the pictures.
Hayden came home from the hospital in a monster outfit.
(Rawr!)
For his first Halloween, he was a monster.
(Hey....RAWR again!)
For his next Halloween, he will be a monster (new costume of course, already purchased thankyouverymuch).
So of course his first birthday party was monster-themed.
Initially, Andy and I wanted to keep Hayden's first b-day low-key...just the three of us going to the zoo or the library or something like that. It's not like babies remember their first birthday, right?
Well, it just so happened that I had a slight Pinterest addiction (Andy would disagree with the "slight") over the summer and the more cute monster stuff I saw, the more I realized that I just had to have a monster-themed birthday party for Hayden.
And poof! One guest list and about eight hours of crafting, cooking and baking later, Hayden (I mean,
Mommy) had a monster birthday bash. I told myself we were celebrating the fact that Andy and I had made it through our first year as first time parents and we were both still alive
and happily married. In my defense, I scaled Hayden's party wayyyyyy back from what I'd envisioned based on my
Pinterest board, which included a cardboard cutout city as a cake-smashing venue and a building-shaped cake and Hayden dressed up like a monster and smashing the building-cake in the building-shaped box...you can see why Andy was worried when I first asked him about it.
In case people forgot why they were at our house...
I cut up two different fruit salads - one had fruit cut up in itty bitty bites. One of the hardest things about going to parties with a toddler is trying to cut stuff up with those plastic forks and knives!
Monster cupcakes!
The balloons weren't supposed to be crooked, but I doubt Hayden noticed...
I was super-excited about my awesome monster rubber ducky find! We taped them to the tops of play-doh containers and wrapped the play-doh in green duct tape and drew monster faces on the duct tape.
Cute birthday onesies are all over etsy.com, but it is much more economical to buy white onesies from Target, some iron-on printable sheets from Jo-Anns, fire up the old GIMP skills and make your own. Cute babies are not for sale at any of those stores.
I found the fishbowl things at a thrift store and pretty much my favorite food thing we made was the Cheerios-cups-with-marshmallow-and-Craisins-eyes.
Hayden is fortunate enough to have a birthday in the beginning of September, when the weather is perfect for indoor/outdoor fun. We set up the water table and the kiddos loved it!
Hayden's smashing cake was a double-tier vanilla cake decorated with the grass-tip and with cake-pops for eyes.
Hayden was a little intimidated by the cake. He was also full of Cheerios and fruit.
He wasn't so keen on the overload of sugar. It did make me question for a moment his genetic make-up considering both his parents have fiendish sweet-tooths (or is it sweet-teeth?)
One of the birthday gifts was a wagon, which Hayden absolutely loved. He also loved being outside shirtless. He probably would have preferred to be full-nakey, but a momma's gotta draw the line somewhere.
