I can’t even believe that I’m typing this, the Hubs and I officially have a ONE YEAR OLD! Of course, I had this big party planned with all of our family and friends to celebrate our sweet girl, but COVID and other unfortunate events that happened recently in our lives changed all that. I still wanted to celebrate MJ’s big milestone, so we opted to just have a small “Wild One” Garden party with our immediate family in our backyard.
I ordered everything from Amazon with the exception of her bloomers, bracelet and onesie. I ordered her bloomers & bracelet as a set from Etsy and her “Wild One” onesie I made myself with my Circuit machine and iron-on vinyl I already had. I found a Wild One SVG (SVG is basically a image file that you can insert into the Circuit Design studio) to match her smash cake topper perfectly and used that to make the onesie. It literally took me 10 minutes between the printing out the image on my Circuit and ironing on her onesie, so easy and I saved like $15-$20 doing it myself!
We we’re originally going to cater the food but since it was just the family and we didn’t want to spend too much money, I just made a super easy Pulled BBQ Chicken in the crockpot with corn on the cob, cucumber salad, coleslaw and Mac & Cheese from one of our favorite local BBQ places. I made her smash cake with a boxed white cake mix and added some smashed blueberries into cream cheese frosting, cupcakes and had these super cute Wild One sugar cookies made by a local baker here in the South Suburbs of Chicago (Panda Baby Cookies). *Tip I found when using a box cake to make it more like it came from a bakery is – use milk instead of the water, add an extra egg and double the amount of melted better instead of the oil it calls for! So easy and everyone kept saying how delicious the cupcakes were.
The weather couldn’t have been better, 76 and sunny with not a cloud in the sky. Maddy had the best day! She did awesome, didn’t fuss at all, ate everything although she wasn’t crazy about her smash cake until she was back in her highchair and I cut a slice off for her, then she loved it lol!! I did a smash cake photo shoot with here in our backyard a few weeks ago with the help of my Mom and Husband and she wasn’t crazy about the whole cake and putting her hand in it then either. I thought maybe if I put blueberries on top of it this time she’d go for it, NOPE! It’s fine though, I got some cute pictures both times and that’s all that counts, right? It was such a great day and so nice to have our whole immediate family together at once, which rarely happens due to everyone’s schedules and my brother in law’s family living out of town.
As much as I love a big party because I love being over the top with decorating and making a big deal out of birthdays, I loved that it was so intimate! I can’t wait for this next year of our girl growing into her own and to see what 2021 has to bring.
