Gonna (Gnome) Party Like it's My Birthday

It might not be a stretch to say that I put in as much preparation for the first birthday party as I did preparing for the actual baby. And in both cases, the results were worth the effort. Gabe is awesome. And so was his first birthday party. I was up to my eyeballs in gnomes, shroom cupcakes and weather reports up until the night before. The thunderbolts and lightening headed out of town for the day and left us with blaring, hot sunshine. We had a stupendous, gnomified day and the birthday boy behaved perfectly. As to be expected, I've got a shit-ton of pictures, so if you'll indulge me, I'd love to share all the details with you guys over the next couple days.

Party Outfits: I didn't want to go overboard with the color coordination of our outfits with the party colors. I chose my dress based on it's price (Old Navy) and that it was comfy and cool. What I didn't count on was the fact that it makes me look like I'm nursing six babies on the regular. Geez. Anyway, I realized I didn't have a bright fun necklace to wear the day before, so I whipped up one of those little rolled fabric flowered ones you see on the etsy and whatnot. Easy peas. I also had great plans of actually drying and ironing my hair. Yeah, didn't happen. No time plus sweaty hair equals up in a knot. The best laid photo op plans... John's wardobe choice was easy, I reached in his closet and pulled out one of the 46 polo shirts he owns. For Gabe, I glued a felt "1" to a onesie and called it a day, figuring it would get messy during the cake smashing portion of the party.

My pride and joy: the dessert table. I love a plethora of desserts. So whoever started this trend is a-ok in my book. Plus I always have a hard time deciding which kind of dessert of serve so putting out a bunch of them solves my ohsofirstworld problems. I adorned the table with a garland of Gabe faces, which I had seen on Pinterest but never actually pinned. And oversized letters look good anywhere and everywhere, I say.

 And the star of the show, big gnome. I had found him at HomeGoods months ago and spent a half hour deciding if I should pull the trigger on buying him. I'm super pumped I did. For 30 bucks, I had a big gnome for the party and now a permanent guard-gnome at my back door.

Let's talk about the goods. First up was the cake. I commissioned Allison of Allison's Cups n' Cakes to whip up this smash cake for me. I know, it's a little fancy for a smash cake but like the big gnome, it was one of our little splurges. And face it, I was dying for a little woodgrain cake.

This is one of my favorite / breakdown-inducing parts: the cupcakes. The plan was to do a billion red mushroom cupcakes. So the night before the party, I was all set to start icing my cupcakes. I break out my red dye. Christmas Red it says. What it meant to say was "River Running Salmon" because that shit was straight pink. I was flipping. Luckily my husband rules and offered to run to the store to get more icing and a different red dye. While he was gone, I decided to change up the plan and use some blue and green icing since their colors were actually spot-on and not mixed by the color blind. John gets home and I start mixing a batch of "Red". Ohhhh, excuse me, I meant HOT PINK. Wtf? I'll admit, I shed about 3 tears because my vision was tons of RED cupcakes, not blue and green. John kept trying to convince my mom and I that the pink would darken and it might work. We were like uhhh yeah right buddy, it's magenta.

An hour later, it was red.

In case you weren't convinced I won the husband lottery, the week before the party, I somehow convinced John to go stump-huntin'. I had visions of clean, beautiful tree stump pedestals for my cupcakes and wasn't going to settle for anything less. So off we went for a freshly fallen tree that hadn't been sitting in piles of dirt and wet leaves. The first place we looked...there it was. So John broke out his saw and home it came with us, where he whipped up a bunch of tree bases for me. LOVE them. And him.

Oh and mini dirt cakes are where it's at.

Aren't those little cookies the cutest? I found bite size sparkly cookies here, where she whipped up my custom gnomes and mushrooms so freaking cute. I kinda want to keep requesting weird things and seeing how well she does them. The middle dessert is smores cups, which I made myself and had rave reviews.

Funny thing about this high chair is that we were scared Gabe wouldn't sit in it. We use a small booster seat everyday and never found a need for the heavy duty chair. Anyway, it turned out cute. Not like our landscaping. That needs major help. Don't judge.

For the life of me, I couldn't figure out a way to display these monthly pics. So I hung them on some twine with glittery red clothespins and was done with it. Can you believe that some people had never seen these? *AhemALLofJohnsFAMILYAhem*

The thing that started it all. The terrariums. I used a bunch of them for centerpieces. Self-explanatory.

Your standard shit-ton of sangria. I wanted to dunk my head in it.

Your ubiquitous custom water bottle label. I found this process highly annoying. I was happy with my method of using packing tape around the label to keep the colors from running in the ice until my method stopped working after about 3 hours. Then the water found it's way under the tape and started running. No mess though, so no big deal.

Another favorite: the favors. Months ago, one of my blog readers, Rose, started commenting on the Shannanigans Facebook page. She didn't have a blog but she mentioned following along as Gabe has grown. Since then, we've gotten to know each other a little better, and I found out that she is an incredibly talented baker. She runs Sweets by Rose and is fan-freakin-tastic!

I know, seriously? She hooked me up with packaged favors including these ridiculously-detailed gnomes.

And adorbs shrooms. Love them so so much. I attached the little tag to them the second they arrived in the mail I was so excited. People raved and raved about these things. See, it's pretty awesome to get to know your readers, you never know what kind of talent they've got (that you can benefit from!).

So what do you think guys? I thought things turned out pretty freaking awesome. I'll share more tomorrow!