A Cautionary 1st Birthday
This is a lesson in rolling with the punches. When Kam was about 9 months old, Covid hit. I was knee deep in planning his first birthday in all sorts of grandeur when the world shut down and social distancing became the “norm”. I had dreams of a colorful rookie of the year themed party with all our friends and family – complete with concessions stand and trading cards and baseball themed everything… even in lockdown I held out hope that it would only be a few weeks and that we’d be able to follow through with the party as planned. Clearly. I. Was. Wrong. LOL.
Here's a preview of what would have been the cutest 1st birthday theme to ever theme. Moving on.
When I finally realized that we wouldn’t be able to have his planned birthday party, I wanted to find an alternative. We landed on doing a driveway style celebration complete with social distancing – but I couldn’t settle for a simple drive by for Kam’s 1st ever birthday on the planet. So, we leaned in. We invited our immediate families over for a cautionary quarantine themed birthday party where we had cake, gifts and face to face interactions at a safe distance.
We watched Kam eat his smash cake, helped him open his presents, caught up with each other and had a great time. Despite being disappointed that this milestone didn’t go the way I expected, the fun of finding creative ways to make it memorable was such a fun challenge during a truly interesting time in our lives. Here are some of my favorite details:
I went into my craft stash and found yellow cardstock, used Microsoft Paint and free fonts to create custom caution signs with my home printer – found some left over ceramic tiles in my garage and slapped the caution signs to each of them before setting them 6 feet apart in the driveway as a seating chart of sorts.
*Highchair banner*
I originally purchased a super cute baseball themed first birthday highchair banner, but for his biohazard birthday, I made a banner with icons of masks and toilet paper (never forget TP gate of 2020) and paired it with some yellow caution tape.
To help people feel comfortable having cake – I bought a simple Costco cake and to go cake boxes from Amazon – used my Cricut and paint to print some cute caution labels and tied them around the boxes along with a fork with some cooking twine I already had. We set the individually wrapped slices of cake on a table in the driveway along with a gallon or two of hand sanitizer for safe self-service.
No birthday party is complete without a little razzle dazzle outfit, right? I used my Cricut and some infusible ink on a white t shirt from Target to make a fun biohazard themed tee. Was it perfect, no. Was it a funny detail that made all the difference, yes.
Overall, I planned this little audible of a party in a few days using items I already had at home and just a few small items I ordered for delivery without contact. It was such an interesting time that sometimes feels like a fever dream, but what I learned most during this time is to roll with it. There will never be any situation that you can fully control and finding ways to use your resources and make the best of a moment can be an adventure with big payoff.
XO,
Stefanie