Madison James Shine: Madison's very 1st Birthday Party!!!!!

That's right... My BABY girl is now 1!! Ok, ok.... so it took me about 3 months to update my blog! Better late than never right;)

So for Madison's 1st Birthday I contemplated just doing a small party at home and keeping it simple but as you're about to see that wasn't the case! haha! I'm really glad with how it turned out! Thanks to my best friend(Cori) and my mother in law, it all came together nicely! Yes, i had my freak outs and at time i felt like a birthdayzilla(get it? bridezilla..lol) but in the end I felt like it couldn't have been more PERFECT! I knew i would be super busy running around so i enlisted the help of a family friend to take pictures so Madison would have tons of memories!

THEME:

I wanted to do a beach type theme but it was pretty hard to find what i wanted. Everything was either luau themed or a boy beach theme. It was easier to go with more of a color scheme and incorporate beach-y stuff into it. SO i went with the colors Hot pink and bright yellow(with a touch of bright orange and bright green). Then found some beach stuff to go with it! :)

FOOD:

We kept it really simple with the food... Sandwiches, salads, fruit, mac and cheese (and to keep with the beach theme): crab salad and goldfish. We made cute little food tags to go on these items (but ended up forgetting a few).

Not the best picture and there was another table of food but we forgot to get pictures of that. (This one is off my cell phone). So I'll post some pictures off the Internet of stuff we used:

My Husband made the watermelon sand bucket and it turned out awesome! Here are the directions: http://www.myjubileefoods.com/portfolio/watermelon-beach-bucket

For the jello we bought blue jello and Swedish fish. I read that it is better to buy clear jello and blue dye and after we made it i could see why.. it was dark blue(almost black!) Also, it is best to place the Swedish fish into the jello before it sets. Otherwise, you have to stick the fish in after and it ends up looking like this picture(ours looked the same). I still like the concept and think ours turned out cute(just wish i had pictures of it! lol!)

GOODIES:

Now this is where we spent most of our time!! I'm talking about 3 days straight of baking!! (9am-11pm). My best friend is AMAZING and did everything. I was just her kitchen assistant;) We decided to do cupcakes,cake pops, and chocolate covered oreos.. We only had about 40 people coming but wanted to make extras in case we messed up! Well.. we ended up with about 100 cupcakes! I don't think i want to ever bake another cupcake or cake ball as long as i live!! Talk about stressful! But in the end they came out looking fabulous! They were a hit!

We used melting chocolates, food coloring(Wilton gels), molds and cookie cutters to make the chocolate molds. The frosting was also dyed and we just used regular boxed white cake and strawberry cake. For the suns i bought Wilton edible eyeballs. We also used Cori's cricut to make some paper cut outs and attached them to Popsicle sticks.

Very time consuming! Especially the molds.

The cake balls were also a pain in the bottom! lol! WE just used cake mix and baked the cake according to directions. Then once it cooled we crumbled it up into a big mixing bowl and added a can of frosting, mixed it with our hands, and then put it in the refrigerator to chill. Once it chilled, we formed little balls and put them onto wax paper. Then we took cake pop sticks and dipped the end in melted chocolate. The end with the chocolate goes into the cake ball. They then went back into the fridge to set. After a few hours we prepared the chocolates by melting them and dying them the colors we wanted to use. We took the balls out and dipped and decorated them and finally put them in the fridge for the last time! AS you can see... it's a PROCESS!

We also dipped oreos in the chocolates. Those weren't difficult at all except for when we had to put the stick in the oreo. My suggestion: don't skimp on the oreos... we bought the store brand and there's barely any oreo filling in those. That made it hard to put the stick in without breaking the cookie.

We placed them in sand buckets with plant Styrofoam holders and then filled the rest of the bucket with brown sugar. LOVE how these came out!

THE END RESULT:

For the "smash" cake we got her a free one from Albertson's (they offer it for a kid's 1st birthday) Then we decorated it using chocolate molds).

DECORATIONS:

Cori made this banner using her Cricut! I love how it turned out!!

I made a few picture posters using Shutterfly! Gotta love coupon codes. These 20$ posters ended up only being about 8$ each plus shipping.

A family friend owns a printing shop and made some cute posters also.

I bought a fish net and we took beach pictures(we went to the beach all summer anyways) and pinned those to the net then hung it up!

Another shutterfly poster and some wood beach decorations i bought from Joann's. We also made the cupcake stands by buying the cardboard ones and then spray painting them and adding ribbon.

Another poster made by our family friend, Michelle.

Entertainment:

Who doesn't love a bouncy house? :)

For the younger kids we bought small plastic blow up pools and filled them with plastic balls. The great thing about her having a fall birthday is all the summer/beach stuff was on clearance!! :)

SMASH CAKE TIME!!!!!! ==>

Goodie "bags"

For the goodie "bags" we filled beach buckets with goodies such as inflatable beach balls, rubber surf duckies, bubbles, and other various things. We printed out pictures of Madison on sticky paper and put them on the buckets with a special message. We did the same on the bubbles. We also had a "candy bar" and beach ball goodie bags that the kids could fill and take home.