In Bloom Doula Services

Celebrating birthdays and holidays with the boys is very important to me. As a mother, birthdays mark another mile stone on my journey of motherhood, so I enjoy celebrating that on its own, but I also want my kids to have memories of birthdays that make them happy and feel loved. Unfortunately, in the Pinterest filled way of mom-life it can be easy to get caught up in themes, decor and presentation; losing sight of what is important. It is also easy to go way overboard and spend a ton of money very quickly.

I love planning events, scouring Pinterest for ideas, and doing all the prep and shopping. I genuinely enjoy it. Last year I threw Holden a “Wild One” first birthday, and I had so much fun!  I also spent a ton of money; well over $500. I am honestly afraid to calculate the totals because I will just be disgusted that I spent as much as I did. I bought tons of decorations from Etsy, made some of my own decorations with supplies from Hobby Lobby, had a huge spread of food, and most of all a very beautiful, but very expensive professionally made cake. It just isn’t feasible for my family to do that for every kid I have/will have every year.

This year I knew I needed to host a party on a different level. I wanted it to be less work, less stress, less hoopla, and with fewer expenses. I decided to continue the skateboarding/vans/punk rock theme from Holden’s baby shower. At the time I decided on this theme Holden was fascinated with skateboarding; watching his dad skate and also playing on his own. About 8 months ago Nathan also bought a ramp, so I based the party around that. It was a success! I spent a total of  $225, and I am so proud of pulling off an equally fun birthday at a small fraction of the cost of my last one.

DECOR

I ordered these checkered table clothes on amazon for $6 dollars. I used one for my candy buffet, which served as goody bags. On the candy buffet table I spent $12.95 on the jars from party city and $24.51 on candy from HEB. I got several bags of candy on sale due to it being the day after Halloween. I also got 9 balloons from Party City and used large butcher paper to create a birthday banner to hang over the skateboard ramp that Nathan made (the ramp and the banner.)

FOOD

I decided to opt out of a huge spread of food like I had last year. That was the majority of the work and also a huge portion of the cost. Instead I ordered 8 pizzas from little Caesars Pizza. Each pizza is $5, plus two orders of crazy bread. I provided a cooler full of cokes, used left over paper plates and napkins from last years party, had a pitcher of Kool-Aid for kids.

Most cost efficient of all- I made the cake myself! I bought two cake mixes and three cans of icing and made the cake homemade on Friday night. I will never pay for a cake from a bakery again, and in my opinion my cake was just as delicious. Not super fancy, and I was tempted to go for an awesome skateboard shaped cake, but settled for custom cookies instead.

I did make one budget exception. I wouldn’t have gone for this otherwise, but I thought these cookies were too cute to pass up. I ordered custom skateboard cookies, and justified it to myself by insisting that that tied the theme together (they did though)! They’re so cute and they most pocket friendly I could find. I paid $79.00 (including shipping) for the two dozen cookies that I ordered, which were 40 dollars cheaper than the bakery I price checked, so they are the purchase that skewed my total results, but they were no where near as ridiculously priced as my cake from last year. I ordered my cookies from Ifrostcookies on Etsy and I would highly recommend her. They were delicious too!

ENTERTAINMENT

For entertainment we made a playlist of pop punk music from our high school days, used my father-in-law’s moon bounce, and set up my husband’s skateboard ramp in our back yard. All of that being at zero cost for the party.

I still enjoyed my over the top wild one birthday from last year, but a party doesn’t have to be Pinterest perfect and expensive to be fun and special. I’m sure I’ll do another big and elaborate birthday again, but balancing it out with a low key and budget friendly birthday most of the time just makes sense.

So the price break down is as follows:

Candy and cake (HEB): $44.61

Balloons and containers (party city): $36.87

Cookies (Etsy): $79.00

Pizza (little Caesars Pizza): $56.00

Table cloths (Amazon): $6.00 (prices on Amazon change frequently, I now see they’re $7.99)

Miscellaneous (ice, sugar, candle): $5.00 (give or take a bit)

Comes to a grand total of $227.48

The moral of the story is you don’t have to spend a ton of money in order to have a fun and memorable birthday party. You can spend less than $200, even less that $100 dollars and still celebrate you baby’s life without compromising the good stuff like cake.