Planning a Birthday Party for your 1 Year Old

Your little one is about to turn 1! If you’re anything like me, you are probably thinking, “How did this happen, he was just born a few week ago?!” That’s how I feel anyway. We just celebrated Baby L’s first birthday and it was a roller coaster of emotions. I still can’t believe it! Have I said that already? Hopefully this post can help you to get yourself more organized for this very special day!

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Theme

Like any party the first decision you will need to make is what kind of theme you want to have. It’s funny, my husband and I had our theme picked out for our first son’s first birthday party before we knew we were having a boy and before I even got pregnant! We knew we were going to have a mustache bash.

Decorations

Now that you’ve decided on a theme, you need to decide on what kind of decorations you want. It was really important to me that we had a high chair banner for pictures, balloons (obviously), some streamers and banners, simple party favors (stick on mustaches), and inflatable mustaches. Depending on your theme, the sky’s the limit! It’s really easy to go crazy on Etsy, but set yourself a limit and your “must-haves” to help keep your budget under control!

Location

This one was tough for us. On one hand, I wanted to have his party at an awesome location, but on the other hand, I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money on a location that Baby L wasn’t going to enjoy fully and where there weren’t going to be a lot of babies to enjoy it. Surprisingly, this one year old doesn’t have a lot of BFFs yet. lol. We considered The Little Gym but ultimately decided to have it at my awesome mother-in-law’s house and used the money saved for decorations and an awesome cake.

Set a date & time

Ask around a few months ahead of time and get feelers for when the majority of your guests will be available. Baby boy’s birthday is February 20th, so when we were visiting for Christmas, we started discussing dates with family. Ultimately you want to pick a date that is most convenient for you, but you also want to make sure that your family will be able to attend!

Most parties are 2-3 hours. You don’t want to take up people’s entire day and you want to make sure that you don’t plan it during Baby’s nap time. You also want to decide if you want to plan it around a meal because then you will have more food and drinks to worry about. We planned Baby L’s party from 1-3. Nap time is around 11am and the time frame allowed us to just need to provide light snacks.

Guest List

You need to figure out who you want to invite and get your addresses together. I went ahead and got all my labels and envelopes together for my invites and thank you cards at the same time, that way I could get my thank you cards out fast.

Click here to view my post on making hand print thank you cards from baby!

Invitations

You want to send your invites out far enough in advance so that they can save the date but not so far out that they forget! We sent ours out about 6 weeks before the party. We ordered our invitations on Etsy and printed them at home on card stock (I already had some lying around) along with our labels. I ordered the envelopes on Amazon and they were good to go!

Plan your menu

This will all revolve around the time of day that you decide to have your party. Since our party was from 1-3pm, we did a lot of finger foods: Cheese/Crackers, Fruit/Veggie Platter, we also did a nugget platter from Chick-Fil-A as well. A few things to consider:

Do any of your guests have food allergies?

Do you have any picky eaters?

Are you going to want to serve alcohol?

Try to be considerate of your guests and tailor that around what kind of party you want to throw.

Cake/Cupcakes

Look on Pinterest for inspiration and decide on a cake to go with your theme. Find a local bakery and get your order in and deposit paid. Some bakeries need 4 weeks notice. Don’t forget a smash cake or a cupcake for your little one!

Decide if you want to do candles or extra cake decorations. We opted to do a light up candle shaped as a one that flashed different colors.

Figure out what party wear that you may need. You will at the very least need plates, cups, utensils, and napkins. We went to Wal-mart for ours. I saw the cutest set on Amazon that went perfectly with our theme, but this was one of those areas that I decided to cut back on so that we could have an awesome cake and decorations. I don’t even think we spent $10 for these items.

Party activities and games

For a one year old’s party you can keep it pretty simple. Just blowing some bubbles and having some spare balloons for them to play with should be plenty. They can also finger paint and play outside.

Music

This was the hubby’s job. We wanted to have some music playing in the background just to have something going on during the down times of eating and visiting.

Outfit

Select an outfit for the party (something a little more fancy) and maybe a different outfit for the cake smash. Our little one wore a tuxedo I found on Amazon for the party and for opening presents. I had planned on changing him for cake but in the end just took off his little jacket, rolled up his sleeves and threw a bib on him.

We did give him a bath right after the cake smash (he had so much cake in his hair!) and changed him into his more casual outfit. This set on Amazon is perfect.

Helpful Tips

Try to put anything together in advance because the morning of is going to be stressful. Set out outfits, take things out of the packaging, or at least wrangle everything into a box so that you won’t be hunting around in a frenzy.

Did you know that you can place an order for balloons in advance from Party City? I didn’t. Luckily, everything turned out fine, but this would have been one less thing to have to worry about.

Do yourself a favor and make a list of things that you need to do in advance and try to keep yourself organized. It really helped my stress levels. Better yet, download this FREE printable to help you plan your little one’s party. I hope it helps!