What Jay Wore

 Shirt

Pants

Shoes

New Car Seat

 As soon as I moved to Florida I was on the hunt for a new more comfy, stylish and longer lasting car seat. And I found it, the Pira 70. I wanted a better one for Jay because his old one just wasn't cutting it for me anymore he had it since he was 6 months old and at first like everything we buy the first time I loved it and thought it couldn't get any better but little did I know. So I wanted the best for a reasonable price and I believe this one is the best for Jay and me. For Jay it's more comfortable, soft and fits him better. For me it's easier to install, use when it comes to the recline, easier to clean and just overall cute!. So I'm very satisfied with this car seat until he grows out of it. I'm hopeing it will be still up to date and standards of car seats come time for my next child because of the tiny fit insert in the first picture. Which is for newborn to 18 lbs. but if not it's ok I wasn't paying anything more or less for that part it just comes with the seat, and in the end it will have served it's purpose for Jay and that's all that matters.

More Birthday Decor

 Although it was April 16th I want to share my decor ideas and his special day!

My decor ideas came from many blogs but I just made them into my own.

So I made his name with cardboard letters from joann fabrics also using fabric and paint that matched my color scheme. I hadn't planned on using the squeries sticking out of the side of the "J" and the taped twine on the walls, but that morning didn't exactly go the way I wanted to I had to make do with what I had around the house. So I got the idea to do this from graysparrow.com but I changes it up a little, I really wanted to use the branch in the example but I couldn't find anything similar that was like that to be accessible to me.

So the circle garland at first had no place at all but I just knew I wanted to use it so I found two places to hang them in my little space to decorate. This garland looks easy to make but it was a very tedious and lengthy project, I would of documented it had it not been 2am and if I wasn't half asleep. With that said I got this idea from an etsy page I came across, I was going to order them but they didn't have my colors and I figured I could make them for the price it would cost me to buy them plus the tax and shipping. And I did I got the string for free, funny little story behind that. "We were at our neighborhood store the night before Jay's birthday and he wet his diaper so I ran out to the car to change him because I didn't bring it in the store and Jaylen was holding the string and I didn't notice until we were pulling out." Anyway so the paper was 65cent and half off and I used 4 colors you do the math. Those turned out great and I even recycled them and used them in his play room and bedroom.

(not the best picture sorry)

Every needs birthday hats, so instead of buying those small ugly and slightly shiny typical birthday hats I made them. I don't know if you can tell but they are slightly bigger than the standard birthday hat. I also wanted them to be plain but stick out a little so they wouldn't out shin Jaylen's special birthday hat so thats why I took the time to cordinate the color of the hat with the ribbon. This idea to make these hats came from pinterest then yet another link, I was going to embellish them like the example I found but I thought they looked fine the way they were. 

The main center piece that just made Jaylen stand out at his little party, tissue paper pom poms! These were fun to make because anticipating how they would look after you opened them was the exciting part. And when I stepped back to really look at them they looked so good. I saw this idea on tumblr on one of my favorable mom blogs. But she ordered her's and I was going to but again they didn't have the colors I was going for so I found out how to make them myself. I also made them for a lot cheaper rather than buying them. I got the tissue paper at party city for a dollar for 4 colors and the ribbon for $2.67 and I got 3 colors of that orange, yellow and green. 

The banner, you just have to have the "happy birthday" banner. So I made this myself with a little inspiration of course but making it was simple I just used some stock paper from joann's and found a font I like on the computer and then simply printed it out, traced the letters and cut them out. I was originally going to buy this banner too but like the rest of the decor I decided to make it. Although the link to the paper says the paper was 9 dollars no way I spent that much om some paper. I got them in store for 65 cent each. So in the end I saved a bunch. When it came to putting these together it wasn't as tedious as the circle garland surprisingly. All I did was poke a small hole in each side of each letter and put the string through and tied it

Streamers! Chevron streamers that is, so theses little guys were probably the easiest for me as far as assembly after pre-assembly..so maybe they weren't but I just wanted to make myself feel better about it. Any way I used orange and green it looks really lime green but at party city that was the closest I could get to a pastel green. I saw this on pinterest and I followed the trail to the link that led me here to this wonderful idea I just had to steal.

Jaylen's 1st Birthday!

The Cake! I will say I'm the proud designer of the cake, I took the decorations that I came up with and the colors and shapes and just designed the cake off the dome. Then I sent the picture of what I wanted it to look like to my sister and she just drew it so it was a lot more understandable than my first sketch. She took it to a local baker and they made this cute little..well 5 tier cake. The candle was very last minute and not what I had in mind but it worked.

 The rest of the food ended up just being fruits and veggies even though I had planned for more we were running out of time to get to our next destination of the day. And that funny looking juice bottle was a last minute thing too, I had originally planned for a homemade drink but this was close enough. So because I didn't make my own drink I decided to decorate the bottle with the left over fabric and ribbon. As far as the fruits and veggies I did see this idea elsewhere but again just made it my own, so I first saw it on pinterest then I followed the link and presto! In the back ground you can see the cups and plates, for those I ended up just using white plates because I already had so much color I didn't want to add even more and then to make them pop a little I got square ones and not just plain ole circle plates.

 What Jaylen wore on his birthday! I wanted something special and memorable for him to have always. So I set out to find the perfect outfit, and I knew I wanted two different things for him to wear. One for the party shindig and the other for the outing. I found everything on etsy, the hat and bib were a perfect match to my color scheme and so was the #1 shirt and amazingly it happened to match the fabric on the "N" in his name banner! I got everything for a pretty reasonable price considering how they had to make everything and the personalization and I figured it was all worth it because it's for memory purposes and for my amazing son.


Now with all that said I really do believe Jaylen had an amazing 1st birthday and I couldn't of planned it any better, he got just enough gifts and the "after" party was just right for his age. I will highlight the gifts through links if anyone is interested because no lie I got one gift idea from another mom. So he got a teepee, shape sorter, zany zoo, smartrike and mega bloks! In the end the easiest thing about this party was the theme, although there wasn't much of a theme here but more of a color scheme I believe it worked out best and especially for a 1st birthday when they really don't know what they like yet the best is to just go with neutral colors that are for a boy or girl, or gender neutral colors for twins! Or what ever just keep it simple for the 1st one.