Project: Personalized Alphabet Book

If you've read a couple other posts, you know I am trying to expose Bugga to the alphabet as much as possible. Right before her 2nd birthday I thought it would be a great occasion to gift her with her very own Alphabet Book! Since I knew she loved her books so much and read them over and over, combined with knowing that she loves looking at our pictures of her on our phones, an Alphabet book using pictures of HER would be perfect.

I used Blurb.com, which is my go-to company for making photo books. You can pretty much set the layout to ANY design you want, versus the other companies that have very rigid templates that I used to get so frustrated with.

Some examples I saw online used just one word for each letter, but I noticed Bugga latching on to that one example and not letting go. (For example, "H is for Horse" is what she calls "H".) Therefore, I used several examples wherever I could (there are some very difficult letters to find photos for) so she knew that MANY words started with that letter.

Here is an example of 4 of our pages from the book:

To help you out, here are the words we used for each letter:

A - Airplane, Art, Asleep

B - Ball, Beans, Beam, Bath, Bunnies, Bucket, Beach

C - Chicks,Climb, Cuddle, Crying

D - Dig, Dress, Dog

E - Eggs, Eye, Elephant

F - Family, Fingers

G - Giraffe

H - Hat, Helmet, Hiking, Horse, Happy

I - Ice

J - Jeans

K - Kicking, Kiss, Kitchen, Kitty

L - Laugh, Letters

M - Messy, Mommy, Mirror, Motorcycle

N - Naptime, Nose

O - Ocean

P - Phone, Play, Puzzle

Q - Quack

R - Read, Relax, Ring

S - Shoes, Slide, Stripes, Sunglasses

T - Toes, Tongue, Toys, Tunnel, Tutu

U - Up

V - Valentine

W - Water, Window, Watermelon

X - Xylophone

Y - Yogurt

Z - Zipper

We Made it to One Year!

Patiently waiting for her party to begin. And yes,
of course I made her a tutu.  You can't resist
these things when you have a little girl,
no matter how much you think you will.

...well, I guess it's not like I thought we wouldn't make it to one year, but OH the year we had!!

And I hope you will forgive how long it has taken me to get to this post, but I wanted to make sure all the details were included (read: I had time to get the pictures off my slr).

Like all parents, I am confident that my kiddo is an overachiever so of course we had way more firsts during Year One than I ever expected, and what better way to commemorate all our learnings than with a fun birthday party.

Bugga's first initial decorated with a year's
worth of faces was hung over the main
food table.

Bugga was born in that wonky time period between holidays (well right behind Thanksgiving) so this adds a little wild card to who might be expected to attend birthday events between holiday travel, flu-season, and end-of-year budgeting.

The theme for this momentous event, was....wait for it..."Sydney is ONE!". I know, so far off topic. I saw a few fun ideas on Pinterest (of course) that got my brain churning, and it turned out to be a great way to incorporate all the fun pictures we had taken throughout her first year.

The food spread!

Cupcake "cake" decorated
with M&Ms in the shape
of a 1 (in case it isn't obvious).

We had the party at home, and I just made a handful of finger foods (including many that were toddler-friendly), barbecue sliders in the slow cooker, and a cupcake cake for the masses (seriously, we had a ton left over).

The biggest challenge was the "entertainment" for the party. It is not lost on me that a 1 year old could not care less what happens at her party as long as her basic needs are met (food and getting attention, of course). So I was torn as to what to have planned for the kids to "do" while the parents mingled and talked everything kiddo. Add to that the range of children's ages - we had 3-month-olds all the way up to 7 years. How the heck do you entertain this crowd? Off to Pinterest I went to find ideas.

I decorated with Bugga faces wearing party
hats all over the party space.

Bugga faces everywhere!

And we found the perfect one, and it was perfect for tasking my husband with so he could contribute to the party planning without getting caught up in the details he does NOT find enthralling. What was my solution? A cardboard maze! We still didn't have furniture in our dining room, so it was the perfect place to set up a giant cardboard monstrosity. And Mr. MOMba really got into it, adding skylights, and decorating with polka-dot duct tape and velvet curtains. And the kids loved it. Bugga loved it so much that we kept it in there for the next 6 months until we moved (yep, really slow to go after that dining room furniture, but I swear we will have some soon).

Anyway, enjoy some photos from the big event - maybe someone out there can use this for some planning inspiration! *OK, I really thought we had taken some photos of the cardboard tunnel setup, but I can't find them anywhere...I will update the 'ol blog with some pics should I ever dig them up. ** Update (10/6/2013): Found one!

She was very hesitant in giving her
cake a try. This is the before shot.

This is the after-shot! Not too
 much damage, actually.

Here's our "dining room" - you can see the cardboard tunnel
 around the back, with multiple doors, skylights, etc. - the kids loved it!