Max’s Italian Themed Birthday Party

My son Max looooooves to eat.  So I thought what better way to celebrate his birthday than to have an Italian theme party because all of his favorite foods are Italian.   Specifically pizza, pasta and paninis because, well, who doesn’t like all of those things?! If you follow me on Instagram (@FindingSilverLinings) then you probably have seen some of these photos.  I am an oversharer 🙂  I ordered  paper decorations from Oriental Trading Post and made all of the other ones.  I’ll share links for the tutorials and templates that I used to help me. I’ll let the photos do most of the talking…

With any party, the invitation sets the tone.  Call me cheap, but I hate paying for things that I can make myself.  So I boiled pasta, rinsed in cool water, tossed Max in the pot and started snapping.  I made the invitations by creating a collage on PicMonkey.com then printed them as 5″x 7″ prints on SnapFish.com (and used a 50% off coupon code that I googled).  I got 60 invitations for around $15 with shipping.  Not bad for these beauts…

I’ve found that food labels and decorations really make a theme party feel cohesive.  I saw this on Pinterest and used the free template download to tweak.   It was a sock monkey themed party and I downloaded the candy buffet labels.

I uploaded a couple of fun photos and pasted them on, then typed up the labels.

Then hot glued each to a clothespin to attach to the pasta trays.

I hate not knowing what’s in a buffet sandwich (or a panini in this case) so I made some labels for those too.

 

Since I didn’t want the whole party to be crepe paper and balloons, I used what I had laying around the house to make decorations.  The photo above shows one of the washed out tomato cans filled with dollar store sunflowers.

Because I always go way overboard lol! I did this with empty olive oil bottles too.  I also filled hurricanes with different pasta for some fun food texture.  I emptied out my pots and pans, threw in a few mini baskets of fresh garlic, lemons, and tomatoes on the vine for some yummy decor that I will surely use later.

I didn’t make everything obviously. There were a few things that we bought to entertain the kiddos.  We rented a bounce house (no pic = bad mommy) and had little bowls filled with sticky mustaches.  There were lots of photos like this floating around my family’s Instagram and Facebook pages because I couldn’t resist buying this.

My niece Taya in a stash posing as an Italian pizza maker=priceless.  Max was digging the mustache theme too.  I can’t decide if he looks like Tom Selleck or Super Mario.  You decide.

It was so great to get my friends and our babies together!  A little over a year ago four of us were pregnant at the same time.  Here’s a photo of us at a baby shower with buns in the ovens and this past weekend with our littles.

Speaking of not being pregnant, lol, I tried a spritzer-ish drink I think I invented.  Pellegrino and Pino.  It was ahhhhmazing.  Drinks lead me to eating cookies and sugary stuff.  I downed about 5 oreos dipped in red, white and green chocolate I made for some festive favors.

Speaking of desserts, I also made Max’s smash cake and the bunting on top.  I am loving this mini bunting trend.  So cute & festive!

He actually didn’t know what to do with this cake for a few moments.  He eventually figured it out 😛

If you haven’t noticed, about half of these pictures were snatched off of Instagram.  I whipped this up in PicMonkey, printed and framed a few of these babies around the house.  The party’s hashtag was #MaxIsOne .  Look it up 🙂

There was no way I was attempting his cake, so we enlisted the help of a local bakery to print this photo out onto sugar paper and stick it on the cake for the rest of us.