Graham's "If You Give a Boy a Party"- First Birthday

I made all the decorations except for the lanterns, honeycombs and the fans over drinks. Pretty much everything came from the dollar store. Most of my party ideas were saved to my Pinterest board.

I found glass jars at Hobby Lobby and filled them with different kinds of cookies. The gallon jar was filled with a few kinds of chocolate chip cookies, one smaller jar had butter cookies, lemon sandwich cookies, and raspberry jam sandwich cookies, and the other smaller jar had sprinkle sugar cookies filled with oreos that my mom made. They were a hit! I bought sprinkle cupcakes and smash cake at Target, as well as the cookie cake, which they decorated with green and blue polka dots and sprinkles. Then I added a homemade bunting (found the plain flags at Hobby Lobby) to the cake.

Since there aren’t licensed products for If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, I had to be creative. I was lucky and found milk and cookie cutouts at the dollar tree, and those were the base for most of the decorations. I took pictures of pages from the book and used those as well, like for the drink signs or for the mouse coloring. I found some really cute cork board stick on letters on clearance at Target and used them for the banners, labeling the cookie jars (one said “nom nom”, one ” crunch” and one “cookies”), etc. With some ingenuity the party decorations came together and represented the book theme without spending a million dollars in licensed products (mickey mouse, anyone?).

The kids had a great time, the adults were smiling, and birthday boy was all giggles the whole day. Thank you everyone who made this party so special by being there!

• What People Ate

  Mouse shaped chicken nuggets, spicy BBQ jelly meatballs, chex mix, cut fruit, pinwheel sandwiches, applesauce pouches

• What People Drank

  Milk with optional flavor straws, lemonade, bottled water, coffee

• Desserts

  SO MANY COOKIES. Chocolate chip cookies, Oreo stuffed sugar cookies, lemon and raspberry sandwich cookies, cookie cake, sprinkle cupcakes

• Party Favors

  Stuffed mice in small boxes, mouse masks, cookies

• Activities / Games

  coloring with chalk and crayons