Aiden's Birthday Preparation

Please don't laugh. I have to confess, I started Aiden's birthday preparation late last year when Aiden was only 6 months. Okay fine, I actually decided on a theme when Aiden was only 3 months old. And I already have a theme planned out for Aiden's second birthday. So, am I kiasu or what?

I chose the football theme for Aiden's first birthday because a Sakhalin colleague of mine - Yu Jin, had purchased and flew in all the way from London an original Manchester United football jersey just for Aiden when he was barely a month old. The jersey was made for boys between 12-18 months and it was the smallest size they had for an infant. So Mummy literally made Aiden try the jersey nearly every month to see whether it fits. And it didn't help that Aiden lost some weight recently driving Mummy into panic mode worrying that Aiden wouldn't be able to fit into the jersey in time for his first birthday!

Anyway, the first thing I did was to ask Hubby to snap pictures of Aiden wearing the jersey. The jersey was still too big for him and I actually had to pin his shorts to make it smaller. Read the post entry here. I then chose one single picture (obviously the cutest one of them all) and made it the official picture for Aiden's birthday:

It wasn't easy making Aiden smile with the jersey on!

Next, my sister and I went to the printing shop and worked with the designer to make a banner for Aiden's birthday. By then I had already done my research and had decided on a tag line: "What a Kick!" When I ordered the banner, Hubby and I hadn't decided on the venue for the birthday. The guest list was initially quite small and the initial plan was to just have it at a small cafe somewhere, hence the medium sized banner. After that the guest list grew and grew and we had to opt for a bigger venue. So don't forget to check out the banner in the pictures of Aiden's birthday - totally tenggelam okay with the size of the hall! Note to self: next time decide on a venue first before printing the banner, no matter how excited you are to get started with birthday preparations!

The design.

The final product. Picked this up in January and it had been hanging at our staircase since then up till just two days ago!

Once the official design was finalised, it was time to design the mineral water bottle wrapper, the chocolate bar wrapper and the name stickers. Printed all these on stickers and then I made sure I allocated an hour every night to cut all these out. Thank god Bibik is quite proficient with the scissors so she was quite a big help as well! Again, I only ordered 100 pieces of the wrappers (according to the old guest list of about 80 people) so come the actual day we were short of about 30 of each (since the guest list grew to 130 people!).

This is the chocolate bar wrapper. I developed calluses at the base of my index finger just from handling the scissors!

This is the name sticker. I had pre-printed some for the confirmed attendees (like the Mummy and the Daddy, duh!) while the rest were empty to be filled at the start of the event.

Then I decided to make each table a fan of a particular football club. Don't know how I actually arrived at the idea, but I was adamant to make it work! I actually contemplated printing each football club crest, but one fine day, while my sister and I were at a place-that-shall-not-be-named also known as the place-that-my-sister-shall-never-set-foot-at-again, we found a shop that sold a complete set of stickers of football club emblems! It was such a good find, not to mention a cheappppper and neater alternative to printing. So next step, cut out hard backed boards and stick each emblem on each board!

Beautiful stickers... such a good find!

Then I printed the wording.

And pasted it right beside the emblem.

The end result. Two of the twelve boards were made to say (Manchester United) Family instead of Fan Club. And it wasn't easy making my family members who were non-supporters of Manchester United to actually sit at those tables!

Next, my sister suggested that we make football fields as center pieces. It wasn't easy cutting the boards into football fields and we had earlier encountered multiple failures in colouring the white lines in, as the board kept soaking in the colour of the white marker. Thank god for liquid paper!!! Then Hubby volunteered to make goal posts for each field. Unfortunately, that never materialised, so I made corner flags made out of white stickers and toothpicks. The next headache was to find miniature footballs to match the size of the football field. Imagine my relief when I found miniature football keychains!!!

Hard at work colouring in lines on the football fields.

8 down, 5 more to go!

The end result. Corner flags were stored somewhere else, to be assembled only on the day of the party.

Next idea: pinata! My sister claimed that it was easy to make a pinata. I decided to not even try! So we purchased a trophy pinata and filled it up with sweets, chocolate, lollipops and cut out reflective paper. However, the pinata stick was a whole different story. I wasn't prepared to pay for a silly pinata stick, so I sat in the party shop for a good 5 minutes, studied the pinata stick and replicated it at home!

Wow, the artistically challenged Mummy is quite creative, after all!

Probably my best creation ever. I am so proud of myself.

With bottle wrapper stickers, you naturally have to have bottled water right? Carted four boxes of this home (alone, okay! Hubby was in Singapore), offloaded it into the living room and with the help of my beloved sister we stuck stickers around a bit more than 100 bottles of these in less than 2 hours!

Aiden loves playing with bottles. So imagine his excitement when we opened boxes and boxes of bottles in his play area!

Birthday Boy helping out... NOT!!!

He kept flinging the bottles around, banging them with each other, throwing them to people around him and bruising my sister's shin in the process.

Beautiful!

All packed and ready to go!

Next task, what party would be complete without a goody bag right? A football loot bag to be exact! Apart from the normal goodies you usually find in a party loot bag (chocolates, candies, blower, mask, noise makers), I also included clappers with the shape of a football (*sob*sob* no pictures) and also whistles made to shape like a football!

Lovely football whistles. You were the perfect finishing touch to my goody bag!

This was four days before the party. All the goody bags were still open because I didn't want to put in the sweet stuff just yet. Takut semut attack!

Can you see the trophy shaped pinata? With wrapped bottles, football whistles and football keychains. And a blow up of Aiden's official picture to be placed on an artist stand at the entrance of the hall. Unfortunately, we forgot to put the artist stand (that black bag in the red box) into the car in the morning of the event. Such a disaster!

Two days to the event. Goody bags packed, complete with thank you cards (made to look like a football ticket) and football whistle.

Good to go!

And of course, not to forget prizes for games to be played during the party. I purchased two rolls of leftover Christmas wrappers from Ikea for a very good price. So all 32 of those prizes were wrapped in matching wrappers, also topped with thank you cards! (The thank you cards were actually meant for the goody bags but Mummy wasn't satisified with the size of the cards - too small - so she changed the wordings and ordered a new, bigger batch for the goody bags, and decided to use the first batch for prizes instead!)

Shiny red wrapper galore!

15th April 2010: Aiden turned one. And Mummy made Aiden eat all by himself (instead of being spoonfed by Bibik). It failed miserably of course, as Aiden was more engrossed with playing with his porridge, soiling his clothes at the same time!

Comot but happy Baby!

And Daddy arrived home at 1145pm, 15 minutes to the end of Aiden's birthday. With Aiden's first birthday present in tow!

Aiden was more interested in chomping on the wrapper.


And dragging it all around the living hall!

Nyummy nyummy...

Thank you Uncle Haji. A birthday present all the way from Singapore! Inside the box was a Deuter back pack! Aiden, Aiden... when Mummy was small, Mummy only had a Swan backpack to carry to school, tau!

16th April 2010: The night before the big day. Mummy had packed everything neatly into boxes, just waiting to be loaded into the car. And Mummy still scratches her head wondering how the hell Daddy missed putting the artist stand into the car. Hhmmpphh!!!

Fan club signs, name stickers, table displays (no preparation pictures, but check out the table displays on the table during the event itself), balloons, colour pencils and streamers.

Last job for the day for Mummy (Daddy still had plenty to do!), wrapping chocolate bars, 100 of them to be exact!

That's a lot of hard work, there.

What a kick! We're finally ready!

Goodies for everyone to take home.

Last but not least, not to forget Hubby's contribution! Hubby prepared a DVD of pictures of Aiden from birth till he turned one to be played continuously throughout the event. He worked on it for a good one week while he was in Singapore. (And woke me up at 3am, 12 hours before the event to tell me that he couldn't get it to work, and then worked on it till nearly 5am till it finally played on TV, sayang Hubby!) And my artistic Hubby also drew a caricature of Aiden holding on to a football while standing in a football field, to be placed on the table with colour pencils. No pictures of the preparation, though, you simply have to spot it in pictures of the actual event itself.

Okay, I am absolutely pooped. Don't tell me it's time to start preparing for Aiden's 2nd birthday... pleaseeeeeee!