This past weekend we celebrated my son’s first birthday (he’s actually born on Valentine’s Day!) and our family is very much into different types of sports but as a family, we are a baseball family. My husband actually got to know each other through playing softball together, so I thought it would be fun for us to throw our son a baseball themed birthday party. We rented a building at a park nearby and gathered up all our friends and immediate family (my extended family is humongo so we had a Red Egg party with them earlier on).

I love designing invites for parties and such and initially I was thinking of going for the vintage looking ticket type but I realized, this is going to be a kids party and it’s going to be fun and whimsical so I decided to draw my son atop a giant hot dog. What could be better than that?? We also told all the guests to come dressed in their favorite team jersey.

We had a fun little concession dessert table full of goodies like Cracker Jacks, popcorn, peanuts, Babe Ruth candy bars, cakepops and more. I’m baking-challenged so I enlisted my Jolie partner in crime to bake a cake. I figure, this is a big deal, my son turning one so I wanted to take on the challenge of baking and decorating my own cake. We did a three layer vanilla cake  frosted with buttercream ruffle frosting. I’ve been seeing these ruffle cakes all over the interwebs and thought they were awesome. I ended up finding a great tutorial on YouTube by the delicious Sweet and Saucy shop. Through their tutorial, we were able to accomplish at least what looked like a ruffle cake! I topped it off with a painted peg doll and mini wooden baseball bat. Lastly, what would any ruffle cake be without washi tape bunting! Coincidentally, we also made the the cake in the colors of JolieJolie–coral and seafoam teal.

Since it was a baseball themed party, we just had to have a hot dog cart just like at the ballpark. We hired Quick Dog who offered a variety of toppings including chili, cheese and BACON! We also had other food for the non dog eaters. To quench thirst, we got some big ol’ kegs of Virgil’s micro brewed root beer. If you didn’t know, they sell them in kegs at BevMo! Utensils were tied up with quotes from famous baseball players. My favorite, “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives” by Jackie Robinson.

Since the party was in February, my fear was that it would rain or be too cold to play in the nearby playground so I had to come up with some indoor activities. I designed some baseball card templates for the kids to create their own baseball card and also had some wooden peg dolls for guests to paint their own little athletes. Check out little Seiya painted by Michelle of Pitter Patter.

I can’t believe my little boy is one! Time flies by so quickly. I know he may not remember this day but hopefully one day he can look back and see how much his mama loves him through this party.
Thanks to Christine, Christina, Isabel, Lisa and everyone else who helped put this party into motion!