Our Birthday Boy

I'm finally getting round to writing about Morgan's first birthday, despite the fact that it's 3mths ago today! My parents came over from NZ for the occasion as did my lovely friend Lou and her cutie pie son Jerome. They overlapped their stays so that we only had a very full house for 4 days, which worked out nicely.

I'd decided to go with a farmyard theme, but didn't go overboard. The only decorations were a couple of balloons and a Happy Birthday sign. I also bought napkins and party favour bags from Sweet Themes website and farm animal balloons for the bags from Spotlight. Oh and I found an old cow patch duvet cover in the laundry cupboard which was used as the table cloth! I'm so glad I did a trial run of the cake the weekend before, which allowed me to figure out how much colour to use for the icing and how long to cook the cake for (still getting used to my fan forced oven!). The cake was inspired by the Betty Crocker website using my Mum's yummy choc cake recipe instead of a packet mix and the basic cupcake recipe from my Edmonds cookbook. I was really pleased with how it turned out, even though it took a lot of work decorating the cupcakes!

Check out our talented son eating cake hands free!

Morgan loved opening pressies in the morning and playing in the wrapping paper pile. He had a brief nap before lunch and woke up to find people starting to arrive. He was quite overwhelmed as he's never seen so many people in our house and got quite upset but nothing that a visit outside to see Pepper wouldn't fix. One of the highlights was when Muz & I held onto Morgan and leaned over the table to blow out the candle, Morgan wasn't bothered with the cake as he was busy helping himself to a chip from the chip bowl and dribbling on the table! 

We had a small party at our house, with family, friends and new buddies from our antenatal class. It was rather chaotic with all the older kids running around and the bubs crawling and getting into everything. As I'm a novice at the whole kids party thing, I don't think I was adequately prepared with enough to entertain the range of ages! It's all just a learning curve.

Yet again we forgot to get a family portrait of the three of us til after everyone had left and Morgan was getting cranky, so it didn't turn out too well. It was a great day although very exhausting. I think I did way too much baking/icing so will remember that for next time!