Augustine's Safari Party

Whew! We have made it through Augustine's first year of birthday parties! He had a great party in Colorado with family and friends on December 29th, and yesterday we threw him a party at our house here in Virginia. It was a great time had by all. I really enjoyed preparing for it--and Luke even admitted the party planning was more fun than he thought it would be (check out his crafty contributions in the pictures!).

He's a squirmy little one year old!

Our theme for both parties was elephants (surprise, surprise). But we generalized a little bit to include all jungle animals for his party here in VA.

I began visualizing what I wanted for the party months ago...but the preparations really all came together in just a matter of days.

Dessert/Favor Table

I made the banner on the morning of the party. I purchased rectangles of felt from Michaels and was able to get three pennants out of each piece. Then I free-handed the letters with black Sharpie onto the felt pieces and cut them out. I used jungle animal barbs (also from Michaels) to fasten the pennants together and to attach the letters.

Luke was the artist behind our "pin the trunk on the elephant" game. I googled an elephant picture, showed it to him, and he did the rest! For the record, just one year-olds do not understand pin the trunk on the elephant, but it's still cute to watch them try :) (and, no, we did not blind fold them OR spin them around in circles first!).

We kept the food simple, but fun--and yummy! You can't go wrong with cheese and crackers, espeically cheese cut in the shape of an elephant (I forgot to take pics before the party, and by the time I got to it, there were few elephants left, but Luke cut some more...squares are nice, too:)). We also had fruit and veggies with spinach vegetable dip. And we had a tray of food especially for the wee ones, with Cheerios, puffs, arrowroot cookies, and garden vegetable munchies. To eliminate the chance of spilled cups in a room full of kiddos, we went with bottled water and juice boxes to drink.


And who can forget, the cake! Or in our case, the CUPcakes! Two of my great friends, Amanda and Nicole, came over the night before the party to help me decorate about 40 cupcakes. We made buttercream frosting and marshmellow fondant from scratch. Working with the fondant was actually a lot of fun and not as intimidating as I thought it would be. In the end, we had the perfect amount of fondant left for me to use on Augustine's smash cake. I think everything turned out really cute!


One of my favorite parts of Augustine's party were his party favors! I saw a similar idea online months ago and just had to recreate it! After months of online browsing, I found clear boxes at a price I could pay without feeling guilty. :) The animal (i.e. Safari!) crackers came in a way too large tub at Sam's--I sure hope Augustine likes them because we have enough to last us a very long time! I bought round printable sticker labels at Michaels, and my husband, once again, went to work to produce exactly what I had in mind! I ordered the animal toppers from Oriental Trading Company, and tied them up with ribbon from Michaels.



For some reason, I just had to have M&Ms (for those who don't know, I LOVE M&Ms). I looked into ordering customized ones online, but they were super expensive...so I bought the 56 ounce bag from Sams and picked out at the blue and brown ones instead!

It turns out my son doesn't really like cake (but he will eat blueberries until he poo literally turns black) ...I'm not complaining. He looked super cute anyway.

A tradition was started when I bought Dr. Suess' Happy Birthday to You and asked everyone to sign it. It is a fairly long book, and I think it can hold a childhood's worth of birthday party signings, so we will continue to get it out every year. Luke also made the prop for the jungle animal finger puppet favors (you can't see it, but they had Tootsie Pops in them).

Thank you to all our great friends who celebrated Augustine's special day with us!!