Preparing for the party.....

So because Bean's birthday feel on the week of Easter, we pushed back his birthday party to this past weekend. And I am so glad I did because while this was my smallest budget and lowest scale party to throw all the ick I have been going through with Baby #3 I sure was glad for the extra time. Plus, since I had to scale back it was hard to decide who to invite and such. In the end we decided to just do family and his "baby" friends that he sees regularly and "plays" with.

This party, I felt like the theme was perfect.....The Very Hungry Caterpillar! Since Bean spent his first year eating and crawling his way through everything it seemed appropriate :)

I had hopes of getting all the food that was in the book as the lunch menu....but that didn't happen and I was too "sick" to deal with some of them so I opted for Bean's favorite snacks and ordered pizza....it was perfect. To label everything and add decorations I found caterpillar images online and then Photoshoped them into tags to make myself.

Cupcake caterpillars with M&Ms
The chocolate cake was in the book....I even made the caterpillar and all the decorations on it myself. Casie was great and baked and iced the cake for me while I worked on the fondant. (Thanks for the directions Kristin!)
I used pictures of Bean's first year around the house
I took all my primary colors from the book and made a birthday banner and name banner for his chair.
Added a package of balloons and roll of streamer to the ceiling so they would hang down and add color. The large caterpillar on the wall was just 12" circles out of cardstock....

This was probably my favorite part. I just cut out circles for a caterpillar and added a photo of Liam from each month to the body. He loved looking at pictures of himself :)

And we had a copy of the book out for people to sign and say Happy Birthday to him so he can keep it when he's older.

There were a lot of cute ideas online and several other things I wanted to do and get done, but it just didn't happen and it's quite okay. I was super happy how things turned out and Liam had a lot of fun and that is all that matters. I wish I had taken photos of the favors and other things, because there are a few things missing, but so goes my life right now :)