Lily’s First Birthday

Lily is ONE YEAR OLD!!! I can’t believe a whole year has already gone by. And it was quite the year, holy moly! We are in lockdown because of COVID but we couldn’t NOT celebrate such a huge milestone.

We had a fun-filled weekend with socially distant driveway visits from family and friends to drop off gifts and zoom calls! I also played around with my new Cricut Explore Air 2 and made some birthday decorations.

Here are a few things that we did to help us celebrate Lily’s first birthday. I put all the links of the items I purchased down below, so be sure to check those out!

CAKE SMASH

I would have loved to hire a professional photographer to do a cake smash but with public health restrictions this was not an option for us. So I decided to do our own. I found the dress on Amazon and I love it so much! It has a big, fluffy skirt and is the perfect blush pink. I was really happy with this purchase. The cake is a Pinterest hack and it was pretty easy. It’s not perfect, but I loved the way it turned out. I bought a cheap plain vanilla cake from Walmart, scraped off the icing and decorated the naked cake with fresh flowers. I added a cake topper that I made with my Cricut using glitter card stock. I included a link below a free cake topper you can order from Enfamil, which is another great option. The cake smash went OK. Lily was not too interested in the cake. She was more curious about the decorations then about the cake itself. That’s ok, less mess and more cake for us!

DRIVEWAY VISITS

Most of our family and friends live within an hour drive from us. They were able to visit us and dropped off some presents. To thank them for coming, I made cookies and handed them out in a cute birthday box. The cookie recipe I used was perfect. In the past, I have had a hard time finding a good recipe for cutout cookies. But these cookies worked out great and tasted good too! I would definitely make them again. I didn’t have time to make my own icing so I bought white cookie icing and icing gels. It was so fun to decorate them and I was very happy with how the cookies turned out.

ZOOM CALLS

We had a Zoom call with my side of the family and another one with my Husband’s side of the family. It was great that we were able to all sing Happy Birthday to Lily and our families got to see her throw away her cupcake that she did not want to eat.

THE BIRTHDAY GRAB

In many Asian cultures, there is a tradition to play the Birthday Grab game on the baby’s first birthday. In Vietnamese, my background, this is called Thôi Nôi. We had so much fun playing this. To play we found items around the household and placed in front of the baby and the baby will choose an item. This item represents their potential career path. We played this game during the Zoom call with my family. Lily did great! She was not shy in this game and crawled straight to the items. She started to pick up the paint brush, then moved to the Red Pocket or lì xì. In the end, Lily chose the calculator. This may mean she will be good at math and work with numbers. Potential career options could be an engineer, scientist or accountant. It is a common stereotype that Asians are good at math so we will see how strong Lily’s Asian genes are (joking!). It was a fun game to play and we all had a good laugh at it.

Here are the LINKS to the items I used for Lily’s Birthday celebration:

DIY NAKED CAKE: Babies and Lattes

PINK TUTU DRESS: Amazon

FREE CAKE TOPPER: Enfamil

SHORTBREAD COOKIE RECIPE: SimplyRecipes

COOKIE CUTTER: Amazon

COOKIE ICING: Amazon

SCRIBBLERS ICING: Amazon

TREAT BOXES: Amazon

THE BIRTHDAY GRAB EXPLANATION: TheOdysseyOnline

It was a small and different celebration but we will have these special memories forever.

Hope this gives you some fun ideas!