Bubbers Birthday Bash!

As I said in my last post, my baby boy turned 1 last Saturday.  There were so many cute pictures from the party that I decided to just put in some collages that my sister-in-law and I made.

We decided to have the party at our new dance studio in Saratoga Springs since there were going to be a lot of people there.  We decided to get pizza for lunch since that was the easiest option.  We did not guess very well on the amount to purchase however.  We ended up with 5 of the super big Costo pizzas left over.  Needless to say, we've been eating a lot of pizza the last few days.

Here is our sweet little birthday boy!  He was quite happy during most of the party.  He cried a couple of times (as you can see from the middle-left picture) when the elastic from his party hat snapped on his face.  Other than that, he was happy and seemed to have a nice time.

Here are the cake, some of the decorations, and some of the games.  We did a "car" theme which turned out to be super fun.  

I ended up making 3 cake mixes so that we would have enough cake for everyone.  Then, I used a marshmallow fondant for the frosting and decorations.  It turned out to be a pretty fun cake and 3 cake mixes was just about right since we only had 1 piece of cake left over.  Wow, that was a lot of cake!

For the games, we did matchbox car races with all of the little cars you can see sitting on the table.  We decorated party hats with cars on them.  We also did an obstacle course that we called "Bubbers Best Car Wash."  For this activity we had the kids put on a cardboard "car" and run through the obstacle course so the kids ended up being the cars themselves.  Then we also had a pinata that looked like a truck.  I think if I were going to do it again I would have cut out the car racing activity as the party ended up being a little too long, but everyone seemed to have a pretty good time despite it being long.

 Here Matthew is eating his first birthday cake.  I made a little car shaped cake for the top of his birthday cake which is what I used as his own little cake.  It seemed to work really well.  He was absolutely darling.  As you can see from the pictures, he LOVED it!  He kept holding some in his hand and showing it to everybody.  It was so cute.  The bottom-left picture is the remains of his little cake.  He totally decimated it and got himself pretty dirty in the process!  I guess he liked it. 

Here he is opening his presents.  It think it helped that Christmas was just a couple of weeks ago, because he actually helped open the presents.  Emma didn't understand what to do with the presents at her first birthday party, so I'm guess that since he had some practice at Christmas, he kind of knew what to do.  He was really tired by this point though, so he wasn't smiling a whole lot.  He sure has enjoyed all of his pressies though.  Thanks everyone!!!

Here are some pictures of the guests at the party.  There were too many to do one of everyone, so I just put a couple in.  There ended up being 24 children and 23 adults at the party.   Whew, that was a lot of people!!  Thanks to all of you for coming and celebrating Matthew's first birthday with us.  We had a blast!!