Dr. Seuss First Birthday Party for Twins - Part 1 (Planning and Preparing)

Our twin boys turned one last month.  I knew I wanted to have a party for them and chose to do a Dr. Seuss Thing One and Thing Two theme for their party.  To keep the cost down, I did a lot of the work myself.  Doing a lot of the work myself, meant that I had to be organized.  People often ask me how I get anything done with twins. One of the biggest tips I can give is ORGANIZATION.  It really helps me to stay organized and have a plan. As I was thinking about the boys turning one, I had to plan and prepare to make sure everything ran as smoothly as it could, because the last thing I wanted on my precious little guys’ special day was to be a stressed out Mama, running around while trying to get everything done at the last minute. 

The beginning stages of planning and preparing was putting my thoughts on paper.  I had some original thoughts.   The rest of my thoughts you can blame on Pinterest!  Yes, I know my kids are one and won’t remember the party.  And yes, I know I could just go to the Dollar Store and by cheap decorations and balloons, and then order a cake from the grocery store.  But what fun would that be?  That was not the party that I was envisioning!  I was envisioning one of those perfect Pinterest parties. I knew I couldn’t perfectly duplicate all of those great Pinterest pins, but I was sure gonna try!

One of my biggest challenges was trying to stick to a budget while still having the Dr. Seuss party that my little mind was envisioning.  To get an idea of how much our party was going to cost, I needed to make a guest list and a menu.  For us, we chose to keep the food simple with desserts and snack food.  We also kept the guest list to family and any of the boys’ baby friends and family from the church nursery.  Once I had an idea of how many people I was expecting, I needed to make a grocery list based off of the menu.  I also needed to make a supply list for any decorations I was going to make.  I knew I would be making most of the decorations to keep the cost down.

Once I had the basic planning of the party on paper, one of the first things I needed to check off of my list was invitations.  I could have made invitations myself, but I chose to order them from Etsy.  For $15, we received a custom PDF file that we could send out as an e-vite or have printed. To keep the cost down, we chose to use e-vites instead of printing and mailing the invitations. Below is what our invitations ended up looking like. The boys' Halloween picture worked out perfect for their invitations!  I ordered the invitations from here.

Once the invitations were sent out, the real work began.  I started working on the boys' party one month before their birthday.  To keep myself from being overwhelmed, I made a goal to work on one project a day during the boys' nap time.  Some projects took more than a day to finish.  I did not want to be overwhelmed the weekend of their birthday.  By doing this, all of my projects were finished the week before the party.  The week of the party I planned to do the following:

• Monday:  Shopping for the food
• Tuesday: Move furniture around upstairs for the party
• Wednesday: Clean downstairs 
• Thursday:  Clean upstairs
• Friday:  Decorate 
• Saturday: Food preparation that can be done 24 hours in advance
• Sunday:  Party Day! Church 9-12:30, Lunch 12:30-1:00, Nap for babies and last minute food prep 1:00-3:00, Party starts at 3:00.

In the end, I was pleased with the boys' first birthday party.  We didn’t spend an insane amount of money.  The food and decorations came together with out me stressing out.  We had a great time visiting with friends and family.  And most of all we had a great time celebrating with our little men, as we looked back over our first year with them!  

Stay tuned to the blog this week, as I will be working on several posts in this series about our Dr. Seuss party!