Party Preparations

Peeper's first birthday is now less than two weeks away, and her party is happening even sooner than that!

We're trying to be relatively low-key with the party, but we're also getting very excited about it.

We're just inviting family and a few of our friends who've been important to Peeper. Somehow that adds up to probably twenty or so guests, including kids and babies. Not sure how that happened.

The party is going to be mid-afternoon, so we're just serving appetizers (fruit tray, veggie tray, chips, that sort of thing) and, of course, cake and ice cream.

We're having a friend make the cake. (Remember our friend, K, who is a surrogate? We were pregnant together and had a "pumping party" at Thanksgiving dinner.)

She makes amazing cakes, so we've asked her to "surprise us" within some fairly broad (maybe) parameters.

Although, I keep changing and adding parameters, so she's probably already regretting taking on the project!

We're not really doing anything in the way of decorating; we figure cleaning will be more than enough for us!

We're also asking that, in lieu of gifts, people make donations to Children's Miracle Network for the hospital where Peeper had her surgery.

They're building a new freestanding children's hospital, and Peeper actually has a brief cameo in the fundraising video for it (near the end, right after the kids with guitars)!

We've already bought Peeper's outfit for the party, and today she and I bought the plates, cups, napkins, plasticware and big pink "1" candle.

But before that, the three of us went went to a paint-your-own pottery studio to make her Birthday Plate.

The idea is that we will use this plate to serve her cake, and later, birthday dinners, every year.

We haven't decided yet whether she gets to take it with her when she moves out, or if she has to come over to our house for dinner as long as we're around. I suppose there's plenty of time to discuss that.

We painted a dinner plate pink, and put "Happy Birthday Peeper" (well, with her real name, of course) on the rim in purple, with some polka dots in purple, dark pink and teal.

The plan is to put her one(ish)-year-old handprints in the middle, in the darker pink. That's going to be tricky.

The lady at the studio said that, at this age, it's easier to do handprints when they're sleeping, because if they're awake, they just want to feel the paint and the plate and everything, and won't flatten out their hands.

We're supposed to wait until she's solidly ("limp limb") asleep, warm up the paint by tucking the bottle under our arm or something, then pour some paint out on a paper plate, paint it onto her hand with a brush, flatten her hand out and put it straight onto the plate, push down on all her fingers and palm, then lift it straight off the plate.

Then repeat with the other hand.

Oh dear.

She's asleep right now, and I'm practicing flattening out her little hand, and it's not working so well.

I'm wondering if there's anyway she could understand what we want her to do, if we did it awake?

I guess we could do a test run on paper, and if that's crappy, wait til she's asleep?

Oh hell, I don't know.

Maybe we should give up and do her feet?