Recently, my baby girl turned one. Deep breath in!
Where did that year go? What did I do for a year?!
It was tough going at times, as any new mum will tell you. Your life is tipped upside down in ways that are hard to define. If I’ve learned one thing it’s that while there are physical demands to birthing and raising a baby, the biggest challenge is emotional. It’s needing to be available 24 hours a day for a teeny, tiny infant who for inexplicable reasons, just needs to be held. At 3am. For two hours.
It takes you to a place that’s fuzzy at the edges and is hard to define. When people ask, ‘How are you?’ there are a million ways you could answer. The baby needs you in ways that are purposefully useless, but emotionally essential. It’s relentless. You find reserves of patience, love and energy you didn’t know existed.
So to mark the occasion of her thriving and me surviving (!), I organised the first birthday party of my dreams. Floral letters, the perfect cake and of course – a donut wall.
So where do you turn when you need help bringing such a party to life? The Candy Buffet Company stepped in to create the candy buffet and donut wall. It was an unmistakable hit – I had people coming up to me thinking we were selling the donuts (and wanting to buy them!), kids playing in the nearby playground doing their best to snaffle what they could and then of course our guests who just loved it.
Customised take away boxes meant that people could take donuts home with them, or dip into the candy buffet and fill containers with lollies. The kids who attended loved it (I’m sure their parents didn’t!) but I just loved the attention to detail. Lolly pops and chocolate bars where individually wrapped in customised wrappers, and the donuts were freshly baked that morning. I can’t rave more about what a hit it was!
The cake was created by One by One Cakes who I met of all places via Instagram. Audrey is a genius in terms of decoration, and when I look at her work I wonder whether I took full advantage of her talent. Rest assured I gave her my ideas and then left her to come up with what ever her heart desired. The cake you see below looks simple, but each and every floral decoration has been hand made. The laser cut cake topper matched the font of my DIY floral letters, and then of course there’s the cake itself. An orange syrup cake with five layers of orange butter cream. FIVE LAYERS.
Everything else you see I pretty much did myself. If you follow @motherlivelove on Instagram you’ll know the journey of making her name in flowers come to life. It was easier than I thought it would be and the result once installed, looked just fab.
I added fresh flowers in mason jars with white table cloths, keeping it simple but feminine. The park provided the perfect setting, so when I thought about colours it was really anything that would offset the greenery and sunshine.
This party was all my dreams coming true, but most importantly she had the time of her life and that’s all the matter. The rest is just icing of the cake as they say.
