Henry Turns 1!

Fast forward to a year later our sweet boy is turning one! I will be honest I was not feeling a party this year. I can't exactly pin point why either. It could because I couldn't think of a real solid theme that I loved or it could of been because of every theme I thought of involved too much. For the first birthday we like to call it our big blow out. We invite everyone, which equals a lot of food & drinks too. I don't know why but I just wasn't feeling it, maybe it was because my baby was getting bigger. Nothing quite like a birthday to crush a momma's heart just a little.

No worries we did end up having a party. My genius husband came up with a camping theme; and that's when it hit me. We could do chili as the food; one meat and one veg for our vegetarian friends, have it outside using the outdoors as our decorations. He came up with the theme and I ran with it.

I really had such a blast coming up with all the decorations. We asked one of our dear friends if we could use their yard for the occasion; lucky for us she said yes! Once we had a location I set to work. I'm cheap so I try to make as much as I can. My husband brings home cardboard and I create.

There's our boy with some of the set up. All of those signs are made from cardboard. I headed to Pinterest for some inspiration and worked from there. I definitely wanted a welcome sign so I started there.

This was the food table set up. I asked everyone to bring their own chairs, we also had a fire pit that we got going. We did have to deal with some rain but it passed fairly quickly.  Again most of the bigger signs are just from cardboard. I cut them to size, painted the background with chalkboard paint and painted the edges with different shades of brown to resemble a wood grain. Using a white pencil or crayon I wrote my letters first then painted over them with white paint. The banners I used brown paper lunch bags; cut them into a pennant shape and just print off my letters I wanted. For the party favors we had a make your own trail mix station set up with all the fixings. We used peanuts, almonds, raisins, pretzels, & m&m's.

I may have gone a little over board and made our whole family matching shirts. Henry had his birthday shirt (found on Etsy and it says "Henry is one happy camper"), and I made shirts for the rest of us. We were the "staff" for Camp Henry. I grabbed some shirts from Micheal's, some fabric paint and some stencils. I just did arrows on the front and using letter stencils put "STAFF" on the back.

Made this sweet sign from a canvas I had at home, hoping to find a spot in his room for it at some point. Took some shades of brown mixed with some white and orange to get a wood grain feel for the background. I free handed the letters, wrote it in pencil first and went over it with paint. The arrows were stencils.

I did cupcakes with fish on them and a sweet little cake for our little guy. Used graham crackers to create a tent and some twigs to make a one! You can see in the background Henry's birthday sign. I like to make one every year to celebrate our kids mile stones. I usually put on their weight, height, how many teeth they have, what they can do, what they love, favorite toys, favorite books, favorite foods and probably a couple of other things that I can't think of right now. It's nice to have to look back on.

I had my sister take some pictures to help capture our big boy (and so we'd have a couple to put out on the tables). You can see in the top picture a nice picture of his shirt. Everything came together so well and it looked so nice! It was easy to find things to add to the decor, a lot of extras were just from pine trees (we used some branches and bark). I think it's safe to say our little man had a great first birthday party!