Jadon's First Birthday!

Jadon turned one this week! I can't believe that our homebirth-turned-c-section story happened a whole year ago. He has grown up so much, and Jon and I couldn't be prouder parents. We celebrated with friends and family on Labor Day, but Jadon was pretty oblivious to the milestone he reached.

My favorite part of the party was sharing a video I made of Jadon's first year of life. I can't believe how much he's grown and changed in just one year. You can watch the video below!

Though it was not a "Pinterest-perfect" party by any means, I decided to theme his party around one of his favorite books from this year, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I asked the guests to bring a food item from the book, and my decorations were littered with book references. Of course, I had been anticipating this special day with a few homemade projects for Jadon's party.

Because I managed to find some "hungry caterpillar" stickers at a thrift store (score!), I looked for ways to use them. The stickers ended up on party cups, a sign for our front door, and a homemade garland.

In order to make this garland, I first cut out circles from extra scrapbook paper I had saved from another project. Then, I ran them through my sewing machine. I knew you could sew paper because of my cloth bags project from a few months ago. Finally, I stuck the stickers on the non-colored side of the paper (okay, a friend helped with all the stickers...thank you, Kelly!).

I also made a mini garland to decorate Jadon's chocolate cake. All I did was trace small circles onto patterned cardstock paper to cut them out. Then, I sandwiched a piece of string between two of the circles, and glued them to each other. In retrospect, I would have also sewn these, but I wanted to try another method of making the garland. Sewing is faster and cleaner. I also like how the thin threads seem to disappear when you step back.

Of course, a red circle, followed by several green circles, resembles the caterpillar from the book. I tied the ends of my string to a couple of chopsticks and stuck them in my brownie cake. Done and done. I love that this decoration saved me the hassle of icing the cake. I just wasn't up to the pressure of trying to make frosting look good for this party!

"On Saturday, he ate through...a piece of chocolate cake..."

I also decided to make something special for Jadon to wear. I created a simple hungry caterpillar shirt with buttons and fabric.

I started by ironing some scrap interfacing to the back of some extra green fabric from my "leftovers" stash. Then, I drew a leaf onto the interfacing to cut out. Next, I picked out my combination of red and green (and tiny yellow!) buttons for my caterpillar. After hand sewing the buttons to my leaf, I pinned the leaf to my grey onesie (it had a hideous design underneath that I simply had to cover up!). Then, while carefully holding the rest of the onesie out of the way, I zig-zag stitched around the edge of my leaf with green thread to anchor it to the shirt.

"Jadon, when are you gonna grow hair?"

This is one of the only pictures I took during the party, and the best shot of Jadon in his shirt. The end result was exactly what I envisioned. Jadon was very curious about the new feature of buttons on his shirt. He eventually managed to rip one off! I have to sew that one back on and figure out how to keep the yellow eyes laying flat (you can see how they can shift and overlap in the picture above).

I'm glad the onesie is a size too big for now so that he can wear it for a few more months. He's growing too fast for me to keep up these days!