So my sweet little baby toddler just had her first birthday!  While part of me is doing a victory dance because we both somehow managed to survived her first year, the other part of me is crawling into a hole and dying a slow painful death because she's practically a full-grown teenager now.  But I digress.

For her party I dreamt up the idea of a "Peaches 'n Cream" theme.  Firstly, because who the heck doesn't love peaches and cream, am I right? #nomnom And Secondly (and more importantly), those are the colors I loved and decorated her nursery in, so I thought I'd just continue with the theme.

It ended up being a great party and my family loved the decorations and food even though it didn't quite live up to my expectations.  (I tend to slightly over-romanticize things in my head and then frequently end up feeling slightly disappointed when things fall short of my perfectly-pinterest-worthy-parties).



I wanted Gracie to be dressed in a little leotard and tutu because what's cuter than a baby in a tutu?  So I whipped up a white-long sleeved leo out of some extra fabric I had on hand.  I didn't take pictures of the process, but it was a pretty easy DIY.  (I'll probably make a tutorial for another leo/swim suit in the upcoming months when I am fully-recovered from this party).  I pretty much just laid out a onesie on some brown kraft paper and traced it.  After a few modifications and some trial and error it turned out super adorable.

I also made her super-easy peach colored tutu from a spool of 6" tulle from amazon, and some 1 1/2" elastic from hobby lobby.  Just measure your baby's waist and subtract a few inches for the length of the elastic.  Then tie strips of tulle until your desired poofiness is achieved.

I paired her outfit with some adorable peach rosette flats from Old Navy and she was almost too cute for words.







{Insert five heart-eyed emoji's here}

Let's talk food, shall we? I made crockpot shredded chicken tacos with homemade peach salsa, sour cream, avocado, cheese lettuce and cilantro.  Delish! For the side dishes I kept it simple with a veggie tray and chips and mango-peach salsa from Costco.  Peach Fresca is my jam so of course we threw that in to the mix as well.  At the end of the party every one got to take home a goodie bag stuffed full of peachie-o's.

I made a semi-naked peach rosemary cake for dessert.  Yeah, it sounds just about as good as it looked.  See for yourself:



I followed the recipe found here and the vanilla-coconut (the coconut extract was my own variation because I can't get enough of the stuff) frosting recipe can be found here.  I also wanted to incorporate a little more peach seeing as it was our theme and all, so I whipped up some easy peach filling to spread between the layers too.

If we're being totally honest here, the cake looked a lot better than it tasted, haha!  Don't get me wrong, the cake had amazing flavor, but I seriously seriously overcooked it.  That's what happens when you have a little girl who's cutting 4 teeth at one time and wants to be held non-stop.

I kept the decor simple and low-budget because when you have a husband attending a private grad school and you are a SAHM that's the way you gotta roll.  I was only able to snap a few pictures (refer to comment above about having a teething toddler) so some little details are undocumented. Such is life.

Let's get this party started! :)









People were so generous with their gifts and love! Of course her favorite part was shredding the tissue paper that the gifts were wrapped in.





I feel like the cake smash can go one of two ways: the kid digs in like a ravenous monkey and kills it in 0.2 seconds, or they take one look at the cake and scream bloody-murder.  Any guesses to how my child reacted?





The second one.  She was definitely the second child who screams and cries as soon as we made her touch it.  It was still completely adorable and after I snapped my quick picture I went over and made sure that mean cake didn't hurt her again.

All-in-all it was a fun night with family to celebrate the first year of my little girl.

Thanks for sticking with me through such a long and scatterbrained post.  I've definitely fallen victim to "Mom-Brain" so slapping my thoughts together into a coherent sentence poses quite the challenge some times.  Regardless, I hope you've enjoyed and stay tuned for more super exciting posts!

-Natalie