I’ve been in hiding. Not just for anything though. The little lady just turned ONE and I have been busy preparing for her big day! On a side note, I also opened up my Etsy store!
Since our little lovebug was born around Valentine’s Day, and since she looks SO CUTE in red, picking a theme wasn’t too difficult. The ever-helpful Internet is spilling with ideas for ladybug-themed parties! The difficulty was parsing through the creativity and finding things that worked for me. Even though my girl was turning 1, only three others in the kiddie crowd were around her age. The rest were mainly 3-5yr old boys. My goal was to find something that worked to keep the older kids occupied.
As we had done for my son’s Easter-bunny-themed first birthday party, we worked with Jill at Peas and Thank Yous to create a ladybug-themed invitation. It read “Our little lady is turning ONE! Fly on over for small bites and sweet treats to celebrate Eva’s First Birthday Party”. I can’t say enough good things about Jill’s invites. All my friends were wowed with the cuteness, the craftsmanship and the quality. It definitely set the bar high to have an equally good party!
The focal point of the party was really the Dessert Table. With all of the sweet ideas that the Internet offered, I couldn’t resist, and took the risk that my parent-friends would be okay managing the ensuing sugar highs!
- Birthday Cake: I spent hours looking for the perfect birthday cake and I finally found what I wanted!
- Dirt Shooters: alternating layers of crushed oroes and delicious vanilla marscapone cream
- Polka Pillows: Marshmallow beds decorated with chocolate icing. As an afterthought, I might have preferred to name them “Marshy Beds”
- Cookies: the cookies I wanted looked something like this. However, we had a little bit of a cookie disaster with the red and black icing running into each other, so we ended up serving just plain delicious flower-shaped sugar cookies, which were some of the yummiest I have ever had!
- Bugberry Cakes: decadent mini chocolate cake bites topped with raspberries for wings
- Bug-llipops: the cutest ladybug cake pops from SoSweetPops on Etsy
- Bug Bites and some Creeper Vines: M&Ms and twizzlers
- Strawberry-flavored Squishers from Trader Joe’s
- And then finally...
- A ladybug smash cake baked by yours truly! Although I love baking, by no means do I even come close to a novice pastry chef, but with Wilton ready-to-use fondant, I had everyone fooled. Just roll, cover, cut and tuck! No mess, no fuss. My dear husband even got involved in the fun, rolled out the black Wilton fondant, and cut circles for dots. I didn’t have white fondant or icing, so we had a punch-drunk love bug with bloodshot eyes!
The first three desserts after the piece-de-resistence (aka the main birthday cake) were made by my local friend Capucine, who doesn’t have a website yet, but whose desserts taste simply amazing. Just the right balance of sweetness, without being too sweet, great textures, etc. For anyone who wants to DIY the desserts, they are actually pretty simple, save for perhaps the cookie decorations, but everything can be modified to suit your needs.
Here’s a pic of the dessert table in all of its glory:
Then, since the party was at lunch time, we needed to have enough lunch to satisfy the troops but also needed them to save room for desserts and cake. Small Bites were the way to go! This was a simple and efficient menu for kids and adults, which also included some vegetarian options.
- Smoked salmon on sliced baguettes topped with a cherry tomato for the ladybug, an olive for her head and sliced green onions for her antennae. She sat on a bed of greens
- Mac and Cheese
- Mini Sliders (some with cheese and some without) with French Fries
- Veg Quesadillas
- Greek Salad
With all that sugar, I probably should have rented a trampoline, but these kid-related crafts and activities served their purpose and kept little hands busy:
Build-a-Bug Table
In addition to a label on the table, I made a 7-step instruction guide for kids to follow on how to craft a ladybug. It was cute to watch my almost 3-year old follow them to a T!
I cut out ovals from red cardstock paper and 2 sizes of black circles (a larger one for the body and a smaller one for the head) and placed them on the table. I did this while watching the Winter Olympics - the distraction definitely helped! I also cut out close to 100 little circle dots out of black felt (I used felt just to add some texture). Other supplies included a few tubes of non-toxic glue, googly eyes, and black pipe cleaners for the antennae. What a hit! I might have gotten tubes of red and black glitter for the girls, but my crowd of crafters was made up of mostly little boys.
Help the Ladybug Find Her Spots:
When all the kids were running around with giddiness (candy, balloons, birthday cake) this was a great game to calm them down to reset, and also give the parents a break. This game would work really well for a group of 5+ year olds. My bunch centered around 3-4 year olds who were equally excited, but didn’t have the patience to stick all 5 dots on the ladybug wearing a blindfold. They were eager to see where they had stuck their first dot, and the others were impatient in waiting for their turn. In any case, it was fun to gather the little group together.
I cut a large circle from red felt and cut out a pizza wedge from it. Then I cut out a smaller black circle for the body and an even smaller black circle for the head. I stuck on some pipe cleaners for the antennae and of course the googly eyes, and voila, a ladybug! A friend volunteered to make the blindfold out of some leftover red felt and red ribbon for the tie. She also added a few ladybug stickers that were lying around on the crafts tables. So cute!
Coloring Table:
This was by far the easiest table to create. I had my 3-year old help me pick ladybug-related coloring pages on the Internet, copied them into Word, enlarged each of them so they were one-page large and printed around 25 coloring pages in total (I made duplicates of all of them to avoid any sharing battles). I scattered 24 crayons on the table and all that kept the kids happy.
Finally, no theme party is ever complete without important little details.
We had two kinds of party favors: one for little kids and one for older kids or parents without kids to thank them for coming.
- Ladybug crayon rolls for the little kids with a message saying “Thanks for making my day ONE-derful! Love, Eva”
- Little glass jars filled with cherry M&Ms and red Hershey kisses saying “Bugs and Kisses! Love, Eva”
Another nice touch was that the restaurant actually drew this in honor of the lucky birthday girl!
For the Drinks Table, we brought our own drinks: red pomegranate limeade (aka "Bug Juice"), water bottles (aka "Dew Drops") and the regular slew of sodas. We also had little polka dot straws to go with the theme. I designed and printed my own water bottle labels at home. I got the idea from when Peas and ThankYous used to design water bottle labels too.
I fell in love with this ladybug bib the minute I saw it. I had to have it for the little lady’s smash cake. She's wearing it in the first picture on this blog post. These bibs are very well made, oh-so-cute and washer-dryer safe! However, they are more for “decoration” and photos than actual utility. I put the BabyBjorn Soft Bib on my voracious eater during lunch time. The catch-all feature on the BabyBjorns always does its job.
Lastly, I designed and created birthday-related decorations and printed them out. For the toppers for the Dirt Shooters, I printed circles stuck onto scalloped circles and attached them to a lollipop stick. I followed a similar concept for the "Happy 1st Birthday Banner", where after sticking the larger printed circles on scalloped circles, I hole punched either end of the circle and ran a red ribbon through each of the letters. I also added tulle bows in between each circle. And finally, the toppers for the Polka Pillows were tiny little ladybug and "1" flags attached to toothpicks.
And there you have it, folks! Our little lady is officially one! She had a one-derful day and I had a ton of fun planning this party. I hope you’re able to get some ideas and inspiration from this post . If you have any questions, let me know, and feel free to leave a comment!
Happy planning!
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