How To Throw A Dinosaur 1st Birthday Party

Last night I wrote about the experience of throwing a birthday party for my son during covid, which you can read here. Plans changed and we adapted. On this post though, I want to focus on the fun stuff! Here’s what we did to set up a special dinosaur party for our little man’s big first birthday!

Entrance:

Party Favors

As people came up to the door, we wanted them to find their party favors before they ever even came in. We know this is a bit different than the normal birthday traditions, but we aren’t exactly in the most “normal” of situations currently. The reason we wanted everyone to get their favor before they actually came in is because we put important items in them that everyone needed before coming in. In each favor bag, we first put a personal hand sanitizer from Bath and Body Works. My favorite one on their website right now is the Warm Vanilla Sugar. We wanted everyone to have one at their disposal during the party, and to keep safe afterward too!

The second thing we put in everyone’s favor bag was a cloth mask made by NestingKids on Etsy. The masks she made us were great quality and were pretty comfy. We wanted to ensure that every guest coming had a mask to prevent the spread of covid, and then they had one they could use afterward too! They even matched my son’s outfit!

Other than that, we put stickers, dinosaur gummy candies from Haribo, some mini sharpies, and some pens. We wanted there to be a low number of shared surfaces, so we provided most of what people needed in their own individual bag.

Guest Book and Milestone Poster

One of the reasons that we gave everyone their own individual pen was because we wanted our guests to sign our kiddo’s first birthday guest book. I know some people may think this is over the top, but my plan is actually to give this to him on his 18th birthday. All I ever want for him is to know how loved he is and how many people he has in his life that care about him.

This book is so cute! As soon as I saw it, I fell in love and I think it will be precious when we give it to him when he’s older.

Dinosaur Party Decor

We decked the place out! Everything was covered in dinosaurs. From little toy dinos wearing party hats, to balloons, to my son’s outfit. Everything was dinosaurs. Some people think I did too much, but it made me happy to have something positive to plan and celebrate during a time when everything has been so negative. It made me feel good to be able to throw a special party for my kiddo. I was proud of all he accomplished, and all that we accomplished as a family, and I wanted it to show!

I’m sure you probably guessed it, but most of these decorations came from Etsy, haha!

Food Fit for Little Chompers

There are so many cute ideas out there for dinosaur party foods. For our spread, we bought these adorable food tent cards and printed them at home to label each dish. We wanted a variety of finger foods that were easy to snack on, as well as a couple of main dishes. We even had menu cards (ridiculous, I know!) But, we wanted to try and keep everyone safe. As you can imagine, they weren’t used. But they sure were cute!

I’m simply going to let the pictures speak for themselves!

But what about the cake?!

Cake

For the party, we purchased a smash cake for our one year old to dive into, but I also made a specialty, bakery style cake! This was the best cake I’ve ever made. It was extremely moist, fluffy, and flavorful. And to top it all off, this was the first time I had ever made a drip cake, AND a cake that had a fruit filling. Lots of firsts for this baking mama!

The cake was strawberry flavored with strawberry filling and frosted with lemon buttercream frosting. It was what I call a strawberry lemonade cake. I used Pillsbury strawberry cake mix with a few hacks! I used milk instead of water, 2x the amount of oil but with melted butter instead, and 5 eggs instead of 3. Each of the five layers turned out AMAZING.

Our son LOVED his dino-shaped cake too. Although, there was so much whipped cream that I’m not sure he even got to the cake!

He was unsure at first, but he was still licking the frosting off of his hands after we took the cake away! He loved it and had a blast. We did too. It was incredible looking back as we adjusted to being new parents. We are thankful for him coming into our lives every single day and I am thankful we were able to give him the celebration he deserved. Mama and daddy love you, sweet boy!