Congratulations on your baby’s first birthday!!
First birthday is an important milestone, both to the baby and the parents! Your baby is now no longer a baby, he/she is now upgraded to toddler. Isn’t this such a worthy celebration? Normally, parents will hold a big birthday party and invite our families and relatives to this joyous occasion. However, with the current Covid-19 pandemic ongoing, it may not be a wise thing to do. Here’s how we created a memorable first birthday party for our little one at home!
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Lots of personalization for the first birthday
When a celebration is at home, it’s great! You can go absolutely wild and decorate any corner you want. Pick up a theme, and start working from there. When you are doing your celebration somewhere else, most of the time the space has some sort of restrictions that you can’t do. So it’s great to do it at home! I spent some time DIYing his birthday decorations. From his high chair decoration to his crown. I also decided to make a personalized onesie for my baby, for our keepsake when he is older. It’s cute and inexpensive to do.
Not only will they look great in the photos, but you can also keep them in the birthday journal. It has a great sentimental value, and I am glad I did all these personalized décor and onesie.
Scheduling video calls with grandparents
First birthday celebration will not be complete without the presence of the grandparents for sure. Already with the current pandemic, the grandparents may not get to see their grandchildren as often. Schedule the time and logistic arrangements with the grandparents a day in advance. Make sure the time and date is set, and they are tech savvy enough to set up the call themselves to avoid technical problems on the day itself.
Get a reliable tripod & selfie stick!
As you will be celebrating the birthdays at home and won’t have any photographer around to take all these special moments down, ensure you have a tripod to help you capture all these special moments. It’s worth an investment! You wouldn’t want the pictures to turn out blurry or have one of the parents missing from the photo to help take the picture.
We bought a Remax P4 especially for this occasion. It comes with a detachable Bluetooth remote shutter which is seriously much more convenient than using the timer! With the baby it is not easy to use the timer function to take a photo, trust me on this. The Remax P4 can be fixed with a tripod, you just need to unscrew it when you don’t need the tripod. It was one of the best decisions ever to have this when you don’t have someone to take photos for you. Thanks to this selfie stick tripod, we took lots of family photos and they turned out great.
Cook up a storm for this joyous occasion!
We prepared some symbolic meals according to the Chinese tradition on this joyous day. We ensured to have some noodles for his meal for both lunch and dinner. In Chinese traditions, long noodles symbolized longevity. It’s very symbolic as it represents long life and you aren’t supposed to be cutting the noodles short. But I’m serving the noodles to my baby, hence I don’t have a choice but to cut it short. My mum would cringe at that, but I prefer that than him choking on long noodles. I also prepared some red eggs for him. Eggs represent new life. Now that he’s one year old, his life has just begun! I roasted some chicken drumsticks for him to eat as eating chicken drumstick signifies that the baby will have plenty of good food to eat in the future.
Now that my son already has 8 teeth, he’s eating them with gusto! As our baby has passed the one year mark, we decided to introduce prawn to him on this very day. We are based in Hong Kong and in Cantonese, prawn is called “har”. Which has the same rhyme as a roaring laughter. It symbolizes that his days will always be filled with joy and laughter.
Even though we are pretty westernized, sometimes following a tradition isn’t a bad thing. Especially with the Chinese traditions, if we don’t pass them on eventually it will disappear. So our baby has very scrumptious meals on his first birthday.
The best part of the first birthday celebration was having two cakes!
We had two cakes. One of the reasons was we needed to call both the paternal and maternal grandparents and we wanted them to have a chance to sing the birthday song and witness their grandson blowing the first birthday candle. But there’s also another reason, not forgetting us the parents. First birthday was a big milestone for not just the baby, but for us as the parents as well. The first cake was to celebrate our baby turning one. We are so thankful that our baby has been growing up healthily and happily and wish for more happiness to come his way. Upgrading to a toddler now, I hope he will continue to learn new skills and knowledge to explore this world even more.
The second cake was for the parents, congratulations on going through the first year together. Let’s take this opportunity to celebrate ourselves. Great teamwork is needed to successfully maneuver through the first year of our baby’s life especially the first few months. So don’t forget to be thankful to your partner, for supporting each other throughout this time. Here’s to even more parenting joy and pain ahead.
And of course we cannot forget the gifts!
There’s many gifts that you can buy for a one year old. As he can already point to stuff he likes, we let him pick some of the gifts. Some gifts we gave him include the Kid’z Delight Tech Too mobile phone, B.Duck LCD tablet, Mega Bloks and many more. But one of the gifts that I personally liked was the Usborne That’s not my …. height chart and book. The height chart comes with the stickers where we can record our baby’s height as he grew taller and taller. Again, this will be a valuable keepsake for the future.
We even hand made a birthday card for our baby together. Our baby had a lot of fun opening the gifts after his dinner. He was very excited to receive many new toys and books. He even received gifts shipped all the way from France. Our baby received a lot of love on his birthday.
Last but not least, a keepsake journal
I cannot stress how important a keepsake journal is to record your baby’s childhood memories. Of course you have the options to make your own scrapbook from scratch, but we found this book and we fell in love with it. This Your Birthday Book keepsake journal starts from the first birthday all the way through 18th birthday. I can’t wait to record our son’s birthday celebration every year in this book.
And that’s it, some little tips to help you organize your own baby’s first birthday during this pandemic. Even without a pandemic, it is truly a blessing to have an intimate and private first birthday celebration like this. With the help of technology, you can always include the grandparents from a far. At one year old, your baby is still wary of strangers and may have separation anxiety. Hence, I think a small yet memorable celebration like this is best for the baby!
And as for the parents, don’t forget to give a pat on the back to your partner. You did well! Well done! Keep up with the great teamwork. Don’t forget to celebrate the successful parenting for the past one year for both of you.
I hope you enjoyed this article, please scroll through my website for more parenting articles. Let me know how you celebrated your baby’s first birthday, leave me a comment below!
Featured image photo credit by Freestocks on Unsplash ( 2017)