The Very Hungry Caterpillar birthday party

We celebrated Hudson’s first birthday with a Very Hungry Caterpillar themed party.  I picked it because I love that book but also because it was a super easy one to plan for – there were tons of ideas to steal inspire me on Pinterest and since the book is all about food I was just able to use that as my meal plan rather than having to figure out what to serve everyone.

My goal was a simple but fun party and I think we achieved that!  I did a few decorations but nothing crazy, a simple meal, and we just tried to relax and enjoy everything.  I’m sure Hudson had no clue what was going on but I think he had fun playing with his friends.

Here are some pictures from the party.

The invitation:

(invitation template here; I used Picmonkey to personalize it and then used Shutterfly to order them)

The decorations:

An easy and cute door decoration made with paper plates and some scrapbooking paper.

Balloons and more scrapbooking paper for the caterpillar on the wall.

Balloon and streamer backdrop for pictures

I love, love, LOVE this caterpillar with monthly pictures over the gift table.  It was so easy to make – I used my Silhouette to cut the circles and numbers out of scrapbooking paper and slapped two of my favorite pictures from each month of his life on it.

I won’t be taking this down any time soon because I love looking at it.

Fun pennant (banner? bunting? not sure what these are called) over the food table

(free download here)

The menu (mostly inspired by the book):

– sandwiches (peanut butter sandwiches cut into circles and placed with a tomato “head” to look like a caterpillar and then bread and fixings to build your own cold cut sandwiches)
– chips
– oranges (Halo clementines, actually)
– strawberries
– apples
– watermelon
– cheese cubes
– pigs in blankets (to represent the sausages)
– pickles
– grape caterpillars (grapes on a skewer to look like caterpillars)
– chocolate cake
– ice cream

Hudson’s smash cake – wise friends told us not to use colored icing and after I used colored sprinkles on his smash cake for his one year pictures I decided that was a messy bad idea too, so we just kept it very simple for the cake for his party and used a removable topper for color!

The cake for the rest of us.  Not my best decorating job and I wasn’t happy with the way it turned out but I also wasn’t willing to spend hours on it this time so I’m ok with a less-than-perfect cake (becoming a parent has really helped me relax and refocus my priorities!)(printable food labels here)

A sweet friend of ours embroidered (appliquéd? not sure of the correct term here) this shirt for Hudson to wear at the party.  So adorable!!

Cake time!

He loved his cake!  He dove in and chowed down.  And then he stayed up until midnight that night so I’m thinking all that sugar might have been a bad idea!

We had some extra balloons blown up that we didn’t get around for using as decorations.  We had put them all in Hudson’s pack n play in our living room to keep them corralled; the kids found them and had a blast!

 

Time for presents!

Please note that after opening all those toys, Hudson is still playing with balloons while his friends enjoy the toys!  Hilarious!  It’s like they say – boxes and paper (and balloons) are all kids really care about…not the actual presents.

We had so much fun!  Visiting with friends, watching the kids play, and celebrating my big boy’s birthday.  It was perfect!

I tried to give credit to the inspirations for all my decorations but I realized that I had seen the same ideas show up in many blogs so it’s hard to credit just one person.  Check out my Pinterest board instead if you want to see where I got my ideas.

Also a huge thanks to my friend Tiffany who grabbed my camera and took a ton of pictures during the party for me!