a successful party & leftover cupcakes!

our little girl's first birthday party came and left this weekend, an event i have been planning for in my head since i was pregnant with her! all day the day before i mixed four boxes of cake mix and 5 tubs of frosting into 53 cupcakes of various sizes and various pink-ness. i have to say that there's nothing quite as happy and birthday-ey as a big bowl of pink icing! we finished things off with a generous shaking of polka dot sprinkles, and this is what greeted people as they walked into the dining room:
i had to let a few things go in the name of sanity [& in the name of getting it all done!] but i did finish the one thing that was the most important to me of all the things i wanted to make for the party: the banner.
and i am so happy with how it turned out!

as is becoming my tradition, i started making it the week before the party and fell into the trap of thinking oh, i have plenty of time to finish it! then i ended up sewing the last few letters into place just 30 minutes or so before the guests walked through the door. luckily, our families are really cool, and my sister in law was the first one there- she understands the over-optimism of what we can realistically get done that strikes us ladies sometimes, and also understood my excitement at getting it done! my other sister provided the pan for the ginormous cupcake cake [by way of borrowing from another friend] and saved us the expense of buying it to likely only use it once. i'm telling you- cool families!

the mix of our immediate families plus four friends [and two children] that we count as family made for the perfect mix! perfect amount of guests. perfect conversation. perfect love for our sweet daughter.
and one perfectly happy, perfectly pink birthday girl.