A Dinosaur Affair

For the last year, my sister-in-law and I have been planning her son's first birthday. Ok, we havent really been planning it for an entire year, buuuttt we have known what the theme would be! Dinosaurs! Of course!  I love dinosaurs, and I was super excited when she officially decided on this theme! And once she did that, I racked my brain (AKA Pinterest) for ideas and crafts for A Dinosaur Affair for my sweet nephew!

The original inspiration, actually came from a gift that I had made for her baby shower last year! I have started making "Baby Books" for every one that gets pregnant! Just to make their life a little easier, with all of the pictures they will be taking of their precious baby during the first year! I love scrapbooking and know how time consuming it can be!! 

Anywho, this is the inspiration behind the entire party!

So, my first step was to pin all of the things I wanted to do for this party (knowing that I would probably procrastinate and only accomplish about half!!). Then I had to think of a cool design for his invitation! My Sister said that she wanted to use multiple pictures of his first year on the front, and then the back be very colorful and of course have dinosaurs! And surprisingly, I only had to come up with one design!! I love when that happens!!

 I knew that I for sure wanted to make his "smash cake" and the cupcakes for the other guests, so I went on a search to find a picture of what was in my head, I knew there had to be something close!!

These were pretty close to what I was imagining in my head, but not quite exact! We knew that we wanted to use "cute" dinosaurs and not the scary ones, just because it was only his first birthday, and we didn't want to scare him on his special day! So, After days of researching and trying to find the best cake toppers, I thought I scored when I found a super cool mold online!!! So, I ordered it right away!!! And to my surprise, when I got it in the mail, they were TINY!! I was so disappointed and was back to the internet on a scavenger hunt for the toppers! I came across a few dinosaur toys on ebay that turned out to be perfect! Then decided to use the small molds for the cupcake toppers, DUH!!! Genius!

I was so happy with the way the cake turned out! And the cupcakes were just so cute!

(even after the drive to the party, where the chocolate frosting decided to melt and spill over the cupcakes!).

Next, I knew I wanted to make goodie bags for the kids attending! I had seen on Pinterest that you could print on paper lunch bags, and knew I had to try it! (especially since I have access to some great printing equipment at work! Haha) I was so excited and a little bit surprised when it worked on the first try!!!

After printing the bags, I printed some little dinosaur coloring books, and my fiance and I made dinosaur crayons (with another mold I bought on ebay, just in case the toys were too big for the cake!). I also added some bubbles, chocolate dinosaurs, little dinosaur figurines and fruit snacks (I looked everywhere for the plain dinosaur fruit snacks and had to settle on Toy Story ones, luckily they had Rex on the front of them!!) Then I tied a ribbon on the top of the bag, and of course forgot to take a picture of the finished product! I'm such an airhead by the end of my projects!

My next and final project was decorations!!!!! My sister had bought a bunch of decorations at the local party store, but was super disappointed because all they had was scary, realistic dinosaurs and that wasn't really fitting with everything else we had planned! So, I was on a mission to make everything she wanted for the party and more!!! I searched high and low for dinosaur svg files for my cricut and failed miserably! And was forced to draw new ones and start cutting!

On my list of things to make was: Dinosaur Garland, Hanging things, Dinosaur tracks for the sidewalks, Happy Birthday Banner, High chair decorations, and center pieces for the food tables!

For the garland, I went into my scrapbook paper stash and just pulled out anything that had greens, blues, oranges, and reds in it and started cutting! Then added some googly eyes and strung the ribbon through! They looked so cute mixed in with the streamers that my sister bought!

The Happy Birthday Banner was probably my least favorite thing to make, only because I didn't have the right colors in my stash and had no time to go to Michaels! So I had to settle with green and a tan color (I wanted a dark orange, it would have looked so much better! But what can you do!)

For the center pieces, I just cut our more dinosaurs like the ones on the banner, and glued them to sticks and put them in baskets on the table.... somehow I don't have pictures of them! But they are actually still in my nephew's room as decoration! They look super cute! And I never had the time to do the dinosaur tracks.... this was very disappointing for me! I was really excited about them. Oh well, I guess that's what I get for being the world's best procrastinator! 

Next came the demolition of the cake I worked so hard on! I was so excited to see him tear it apart!

He was READY!!!!

He had no idea what was going to happen next!!!

This was just the first time mommy tried to "help" him! the next time it was a fist full all over the face!!

Then he realized it was ok to make a huge mess!!

He wanted every last drop of the frosting!

All caked out and ready for a bath!!!

I was so happy to help with his first birthday. And although there were things that I wanted to do and couldn't, I would call it a success! I cant wait for his next birthday!!!