I wanted his first day to be really special because when Riley was born we both were quite sick in hospital and ended up having to spend 7 nights in hospital, which happened to fall over Christmas Day. So I wanted him to have a really good celebration, which I know he will be too young to remember but we took lots of photos and it was more for us to enjoy celebrating with him.
When it came to inviting people the list was quite big due to friends of mine that had children, his friends and family so I decided to take advantage of my husband not finishing our new greenhouse/shed and make a Christmas grotto. His birthday falls on the 22nd December so I decided to go with the Christmas theme.
I really enjoy party planning and wanted to make it all really unique for him. The shed/grotto was already quite rustic looking because it had one brick wall and the others I decorated with pom poms that I made my self which took me hours, I did these when Riley was put to bed as between him and the dog they liked the unravel the balls of string. I bought paper snowflakes from the £ land, used an old rug I luckily had lying around for the floor and put an old wood burner we had laying around in and made a fireplace around it using bricks. We had an old fake Christmas tree and lights so I put that up and wrapped cardboard boxes for presents and bought some fairy lights to dress the brick wall.
We weren’t lucky enough to have real snow on the day so my husband bought a snow machine from eBay to add to the effect, you may think this is very extravagant but it was only £40 and I thought it would make it all look extra magical for the older ones.
In doors I wanted to keep it quite simple so I just did buffet style party food, marshmello and chocolate sticks, popcorn snowmen cups, sparkly squash ( I put editable glitter in orange squash), melted snowmen (water) a birthday cake and mulled wine for the adults.
We had a real mixture of ages of children that came so I decided not to do party bags and I did mini gingerbread men and reindeer food with name tags for them.
… Did I mention that Father Christmas even stopped by, I happen to have a friend who’s Dad actually plays Father Christmas for Children’s parties.
Unfortunately it turns out that Riley doesn’t like Santa 😦
Mum Of A Little Rocket 