Brennan's First Birthday Paw-ty

We had friends and family over tonight to celebrate Brennan's first birthday. When Brennan was born, I swore I wouldn't make a big deal of his first birthday. I wasn't going to go crazy and do a theme. Ha! Then I found the blog Kara's Party Ideas! While looking through the amazing parties on that site, I found a puppy party. I thought it was adorable and decided Brennan's first party would have a theme after all. I mean his first word was "dog" so it only seems fair. I used Max's party as my inspiration. Let me know what you think!

I really wanted to find a fire hydrant, so I started looking online. One day after receiving an email from Fisher Price, I decided to check their website and found one. It said it was available at PetSmart, so Brennan and I went to check it out. Sure enough we found it there and it was on sale for half-price. It was only $6.99 and will probably be used to store toys.

I have made tissue paper balls several times before, so I knew I wanted to make some for Brennan's party. I think I finally learned the trick to making them! They work much better if you start with tissue paper that is rectangular and not square. My tissue paper was square and I didn't like the first one I made at all, I ended up taking it apart and cutting the tissue paper in half to make two rectangles and that made two small balls. I cut just a little bit off of my square tissue paper to make the big ball. Here's a quick tutorial if you don't know how to make them. I don't know what made me think to put two of the small ones on top of glasses. I just thought it would look cute! I filled the glasses with the tissue papers scraps I had left over after cutting the ends into points.

I used Coco Puffs for the favors, so everyone could take home their own bag of "dog food". I bought the little favor bags at Michaels. I already had the little labels, so I just printed a message on them and stuck them on with double-sided tape. The red bags were for the kids. We only had a few there and they were all under two.

I found the cupcakes when I was "googling" puppy cupcakes. I followed these directions, but just used a box of cake mix and a jar of icing. I also used Vienna Fingers as the ears just because they were cheaper than Milano cookies. Milano cookies would probably be cuter though. I also used Reese's Pieces for the eyes and nose since it only called for yellow and brown pieces.

I made the puppy ear headbands myself. I bought a dozen headbands and the dollar store and then bought felt at Michaels. It was really easy to cut out a dog ear shape and hot glue them to the headbands.

I also displayed all his giraffe photos from the past year. Sorry the picture is so dark. Each one was on a little doghouse and the bone said his age.

The cake! This was what originally sold me on wanting to do a puppy party. I thought Max's cake was so cute! It was super easy to do too. I just baked the cake in a Pyrex bowl (I used lots of Pam and a few strips of wax paper to prevent sticking) and then flipped it upside down into the dog bowl. Yep, that's a real dog bowl from PetSmart. Then I iced the entire dome and covered it with Coco Puffs! It wasn't the prettiest cake, but I it turned okay.

As you can see, we had a great time celebrating!