My daughter is one of the less fortunate children in the world who has a birthday tragically close to a holiday. I give you, being a Valentine’s baby is not as bad as the Christmas baby since you don’t fall victim to the ‘combined’ birthday presents, but I think it may be a little more difficult to plan a party for since people don’t typically celebrate just on Valentine’s Day… if they are taking their significant other out for a nice date chances are that happens the weekend before or after. Her birthday is February 5th, so if we don’t want her party to be on Super bowl Sunday, we instead are competing with Valentine’s Day!
Well for her first birthday we had that exact struggle with the days of the week these events fell on, and a Valentine’s Day family birthday party was inevitable. I decided to embrace it, and ended up being so happy with the results! In the end I actually end up feeling like it was so appropriate, since we love her so much and she is truly so sweet.
I am not the kind of person who feels good about decorating by going to Party City and buying a bunch of paper decorations to tape to the wall, so I decided to have a DIY theme with my decorations and ended up saving quite a bit of money doing it! The items I will admit to buying for cheap were a handful of sizes of heart-shaped bowls and red chargers I found in the dollar section at Target. I used them for chips, dips, etc.
Supplies:
- empty tin cans (however many you want for holding table supplies)
- ball of twine
- hot glue
- a few red/pink flowers, real or fake
- approx. 8-12 pages of valentine themed scrapbooking paper (see my pictures for ideas)
- toothpicks
- small wooden dowels
- balloons
- # 1 piñata
First, I collected empty tomato sauce cans as we used them, and put them to use for utensil holders. I just wrapped them in the Valentine theme craft paper I bought. I cut out a few hearts and XOXO designs and hot glued it all together! Easy.
Next, I made her a little “ONE” banner to go on her high chair. It is just banners that are 4in long and 2 1/2in wide cut from the craft paper. I hot glued the letters on them, then evenly spaced and glued them to the twine.
Some other small additional things I did was just cutting out lots of cute shapes and gluing them to toothpicks and dowels to place in the cake and other baked goods. These were super cute little accents and very quick and easy to make!
The “1” piñata was a special request from my husband, to honor her 1/2 Mexican heritage. It had been covered in hideous rainbow-color crepe paper, which I ripped off. Not sure what to do, I re-covered it with scraps of the scrapbook paper I had been using and it turned out perfect.
The only thing I splurged on (that I feel was TOTALLY worth it) was some oversized balloons from my girlfriend’s local business, Up and Up Balloons. She does custom jumbo balloons with special tassels and they are so absolutely adorable and a perfect statement piece! I just did two red hearts with gold, pink, and white paper tassels and they were perfect.
For food I kept it simple and did things like a traditional yellow cake with raspberry filling and some rice krispy treats with valentines day sprinkles. Over-all, it turned out to be such a sweet little party and I am so happy we had the chance to celebrate our little love on Valentine’s Day!
