Millyana's First Birthday (Better Late than Never)

I am finally posting pictures from Millyana's Birthday Extravanganza! We had so much fun. I think her favorite part of the day was in the morning when we were blowing up all the balloons. We would pile them all together and she would crawl through them screaming! We ended up just leaving them on the floor becasue she was having so much fun.

Millyana's Birthday Extravaganza

What is that saying?..."the best laid plans of mice and men..." Well, that was pretty much what happened with Millyana's birthday Extravaganza. I start really early with the planning and then BLAMO! Life happens. I won't even go into to detail all the crazy things that have happened in the past couple of months but it has truely been a doozy. I joked that Millyana's Birthday was slowly turning into a Birthday Extrav... And on the actual day of the party, setting up the decorations and food table, I felt like I was in one of those reality shows where you have certain amount of time and when they call "time's up!" it's hands off and it is what it is. But it was still perfect and wonderful and so much fun. I still cannot believe she is a year old. Holey mackeral.

Here are a ton of pictures to show how bright and fun her birthday was. I did pretty much all of the baking a decorating and while it did not save on time (or my insanity) it did save on money and I was able to have the exact look I wanted. Enjoy!

Test Run: Orange Dreamsicle Cupcakes

I found the yummiest looking recipe at Cake. a super cute blog dedicated to parties. It has fun ideas and great recipes. One of the recipes was for Orange Creamsicle cupcakes. MmmmMMMM... I thought they would be the perfect fit for Millyana's birthday Extravaganza. I have never made a cake or cupcakes form scratch, so I did a test run the other night. It was also the first time I have attemepted to pipe any kind of icing of any kind. The icing kind of came out wonky but boy do they taste good. And I got a huge thumbs up from Dave who especially appreciated the fluff and butter filling. The original recipe can be found at Homemade by Holman

First Steps

I have already started to prepare a few things for Millyana's Birthday. I know, I know, it is still over a month away. I just want to enjoy the experience and not have to rush at the last minute to get things done. Plus we have company coming in a couple of week. Hooray! My brother, Cody and his fiance, Ombretta are coming to town. It will be the first time I meet his super cutie Italian fiance. I just cannot wait.

Anyhoo, back to the party. Here is the color palette I am going with. Sunny yellows, orange, pinks with a splash of aqua. And another fun thing I found was a mold for little starfish candies. So sweet! So I have started to make an army of fun, orange starfish candies to put on cupcakes and around her smash cake. The mold only has two so I can only make two at a time. See why I started early?

The true inspiration

I still cannot believe Millyana is going to be a year old! Here are a couple of pictures of our sweet girl and the true inspiration for this Birthday Extravaganza!

1st Birthday Inspiration

I cannot believe our little girl is going to be one year old in just a couple of months! I love this print from Mary Englebreit and Millyana loves the water and swimming so I am going to use this for my inspiration. I want to do a sunny theme with lots of red, orange and yellow. Stayed tuned for more Birthday Extravaganza planning!