A Baby Shark First Birthday

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Baby Shark birthday parties are generally loud and colourful! I’m not a loud and garish party colours type of woman. So when my baby took a liking to Baby Shark, I started to plan a party that was neutral, minimal and chic.

Party Highlights:

• Baby Shark themed sugar cookies
• “Lincoln Shark” wood stand up letters
• Custom water bottle labels
• Custom Family Shark t-shirts

Confession from a hardcore A-type woman: I have all of Lincoln’s birthday parties fully planned from now to age 6. And I mean PLANNED. Not just loose theme ideas, but down to logistics, locations, and vendors. Crazy…I know.

Lincoln’s first birthday theme and details were planned when I was about 3 months pregnant. I couldn’t contain my excitement! The theme was to be modern minimalist safari animals and it was going to be SO CHIC! I had all the decor and supplies I needed to pull this party off saved in my Amazon cart. 

But as life would have it, Lincoln was born, developed a personality, and fell in love with Baby Shark! Can someone please explain to me the psychology behind Baby Shark!? Like wtf!? It’s the only thing that will soothe him if he’s temperamental and works immediately as soon as the “Pinkfong” intro comes on. Obviously, the clear choice here was to go off book and give Lincoln a party that he would love!

A Pinterest search of Baby Shark first birthday ideas showed me overly decorated parties in lots of colours and characters. I wanted to do the Baby Shark thing in the chicest way possible, so decided to keep the colour scheme limited to the yellow Baby Shark character while adding hints of grey and white.

We opted to keep this gathering small and limited guests to immediate family only. I know lots of folks do crazy large birthdays, and believe me, we originally planned for a big one as well. But I wanted to keep things as simple and easy to manage as possible. This is very unlike me, so perhaps I’m taking a new turn in life, haha!

Simple Eats

The party was hosted during the middle of the day, so I wanted to keep the food offering limited and simple. My mom made Vietnamese assorted cold cut subs. They were so damn delicious! And we served some veggies with dip and spring rolls on the side. That’s it!

Drinks were Vietnamese iced coffee, lemonade and iced tea.

One of my go-to ways to customize a casual party is to create custom labels for the water bottles. First of all, original water bottle labels are ugly. Secondly, themed labels lend a bespoke air to the party yet is the easiest thing to do!

Themed Desserts

I made a single tier vanilla cake and decorated it with a simple buttercream recipe. To decorate, I made fondant from mini marshmallows, coloured it and modelled a Baby Shark for the topper. I also cut out “Doo Doo Doo Doo” words to circle the cake.

My mom made lemon flavoured macarons. She’s totally mastering these after the Macrons 101 class we took her to for Mother’s Day! Lemon no-bake cheesecakes in mini mason jars were provided by my sister.

The highlight of the table were these themed Baby Shark sugar cookies by the talented Pam at Sugar Shimmer. These cookies were the first element I locked down as soon as Baby Badau’s theme and date were set! Pam is the MOST TALENTED cookie artist in this YYC, hands down.

Cake Smash…Fail

One of the planned highlights of the party was to be the cake smash! I picked up an antique wood high chair from Kijiji for this milestone event. Initially planning to paint the chair white and dress it up with a cute themed “ONE” banner, I opted instead to leave the high chair as is. The original wood look of the chair was just too darling, and I really appreciated the simplicity of not having a banner draped across the front.

Lincoln’s crown was handmade out of grey felt and the number 1 was simply cut out from yellow paper and glued on. I didn’t bother to add an elastic strap to make sure it stayed on his head, so ended up using bobby pins to attach it to the very little tufts of hair that baby has. It worked for long enough to get some photos.

My idealistic visions of a cake smash didn’t play out at all. Lincoln kind of just pushed it around and showed no interest at all in smashing and eating it. Lincoln has mastered using utensils to eat his meals, so I wonder if I had given him a fork whether he would have went for it. Or, perhaps it was the crazy paparazzi with camera phones all up in his face that turned him off of the idea! *shrug* Ah well. No cake smash photos for us – womp womp.

One element of the party that was my pride and joy were the custom Family Shark t-shirts we made for everyone. I purchased SVG files from a vendor on Etsy and printed them on iron-on transfer paper. Then just simply ironed the image onto t-shirts I purchased from Amazon. I gotta say…Amazon has been my best friend during this year on mat leave! >_<

Yep, I’m really a mom now! I totally get the whole catering to your baby’s likes thing. Clearly. I expect the 5 other themes I’ve set for Lincoln’s birthdays will also veer off course, and that’s A-OK. I just love seeing his joy! So much so, that on his birthday I bought him a foil Paw Patrol balloon he was eyeing while we were in the grocery store checkout line. It was expensive as far as foil balloons go, and he played with it for about 5 minutes before moving on to better things. But, totally worth it to give him that 5 minutes of joy.

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