Well, hello friends.
I’ve legit been working on this post for a couple of weeks. It should not be that hard to write a blog post! I thought that after the party, things would slow down, and they just didn’t. So here we are, like several weeks later, and I’m finally getting this darned thing up.
Miss Bean is 1! I can’t even believe it. How does my life go so fast? Ok, before I go off on an existential crisis here, let me tell you about her party.
Since Bean isn’t old enough yet to pick what theme she wants for her party, it was up to me. When I thought about what I wanted, I didn’t know specifics, but I knew for sure I wanted to get good pictures! So I did what anyone would do, and I turned to Pinterest.
Pinterest is pretty much my best friend & worst enemy. It’s so great for inspiration, but it’s way easy to get out of hand. I recently read this article on the struggles of those with my Meyers-Briggs personality type and one of the things it said was “Constantly biting off more than you can chew… and then chewing it out of stubbornness.” So me + Pinterest = setting the bar too high and then killing myself to reach it. Haha. I quickly set on the Burlap & Lace theme, which is girlier than we will likely ever do again, but I knew the pictures would be awesome. Once the theme was set, I let inspiration run away with me.
Despite all that, somehow this was the first party I’ve thrown where we were actually completely ready on time. I’m usually the hostess who’s scrambling to get everything on the table as her guests mill around not being sure what to do. Ha.
Anyway. This was our food table. Complete with quiche, mini sausage rolls, gougères, cheese sticks, and antipasti skewers. I wanted to have a menu where no utensils were needed. Oh, and a menu that I could make mostly ahead of time, because I was not going to be waking up at 5 am to get things ready the day of.
Oh, we also had little cups of Cheerios for the babies in attendance, and pink lemonade. 
We set up this little photo area to get those great shots I was looking for.
We set up this dessert table out in the yard, with mini strawberry guava macarons, salted caramel cake pops (or as we call them, lollicakes,) raspberry meringue roses, and pink popcorn. Luckily my mom had this great desk that was just the right color scheme for this party. I forgot to take a picture, but you can see in the lower right-hand corner of this one that we set up a little birdcage with cookie favors in. We set it on an open drawer.
Here’s what the cookies looked like. (Get a tutorial for these roses here. This technique is way easier than it looks, but hers look way better than ours! haha.)
And now for some shameless photos of Miss Bean. Because she’s awesome.
We made this tutu just for the party. I still haven’t managed to get all the cake out of it, but it’s only the kind where you tie pieces of tulle on an elastic band, so it’s not really made for heavy use.
This was the best photo we could get of Bean and her cousin, Sweets. But aren’t they just ridiculously cute? His suspenders are amazing.
Cake time! We ditched the shirt for easier cleanup.
She was very timid with her cake at first.
But then she started rocking the whole thing. It eventually came off the cake stand.
And then she sat in it. That’s one way to do a cake smash!
Check out my Pinterest board here. I hope you feel inspired! Give me a follow while you’re there.