Happy Birthday Tobyn!

I wrote a post on Tobyn's birthday about this past year, you can read that here.

Yesterday though, we celebrated his birthday with all our friends and family. 

All of my family lives at least 3 1/2 hours away, but that didn't stop them.

It was a wonderful day!

The theme was elephants, simple and adorable. 

I handmade everything with a some help from family, and all the food was made by my sister and her huge family. Seriously, they were like a catering team, all 6 of them helped in some way or another.  

And it turned out so beautiful!

The cake stand was one of my favorite pieces, did you know how expensive cake stands are??

I wasn't about to go broke for a cake stand I liked, so since the theme was elephants, I made a elephant "pedestal" like they use in the circus. I bought a $13 flower pot  from Lowe's, turned it upside down and painted it with some paint I already had for the party. Voilà!

I love all the details from the chevron napkins, to the paper straws. The napkins were from the  Oriental Trading Co. Straws, plates, cups and balloons were from the very affordable Birthday Direct.

You can't see them too well here, but these platters turned out so good.

Again, I wasn't going to pay $40 a platter. So I found four ( two small, two large) gorgeous pale blue plates on major sale at Kirkland's for $.78 a piece! (That's what I'm talking about!)

And then two candlesticks on sale at Hobby Lobby for $2 a piece. I painted those red. 

A little bit of hot glue and BANG. Perfection. 

Vintage Roasted Peanut Bags from The Sugar Diva, they had elephants on them. So cute!

Nutella Bruchetta is the bomb. Just as a side note, do yourself a favor and make this.

The platter they are sitting on, you can't see very well, but I just bought an out of season plastic platter at Hobby Lobby and painted grey, red and blue chevron, It turned out precious!

We love the Starbuck's coffees you can buy at the store, so I just collected the bottles for a few months for a "vintage milk bottle" counter. We offered cold milk, because with all those sweets, it was a must. 

Our "First Year" Window.

We used golf tees to sick balloons in the ground and lined the walkway all the way to the door!

Got this idea over at Life's Little Celebrations. I love it!

 And he obviously had a great time!
This "One" banner was made by me, it turned out so well and was super simple!

It was a wonderful day, but there were some things that worked and some that didn't. 

Things I wish we'd done but forgot.

I'm going to write a post about my First Birthday Party Tips in the near future, so keep a lookout!

Lyz