Preparation for 1 year old birthday

To many parents, the 1st birthday is one of the most significant day in their children's lives. It is not uncommon to hear stories of parents throwing lavish parties for their little ones. However, my focus is to let Jonas play and enjoy his day rather than spending lots of money for the party but he will not remember about it when he grows up.

Thus, my initial plan is to organize it in an indoor playground so that the children can be entertained as there's a lot of kids in our extended families and friends. There are several choices available as more and more indoor playgrounds are sprouting out in Singapore because of the higher spending power of parents nowadays. However, through a quick online research, I soon found that this is not a suitable venue option for us. Most venues can only host 15-20 kids and usually for 2-3hours. Our family is bigger and there are more adults compared to kids in our guest list. My husband also wish to take the opportunity to spend more quality time with Jonas as he had not been able to do so for the past year due to his extremely busy work schedule. Finally, we opt to organize it at a chalet. Our planning was done quite last minute therefore we don't have much choices with the location and the date that we wanted. I'd advise to plan and book at least 6 months in advance to avoid any disappointment.

Unlike indoor playgrounds which have a package deal of food and entertainment, we have to prepare the food ourselves. My husband and I had abit of disagreement regarding this issue as I'm more pro towards catering (ready food) while he towards barbecue (self prepared food). For me, I want to keep everything to its simplest so that I can spend Jonas's special day with him only. Barbecuing will take my time away from him because if not a lot of people want to barbecue, I guess we as the hosts will have to do it. My husband think doing barbecue is more fun and should be an activity not to be missed during a chalet stay. As we can't talk each other out of our decision, we made a compromise. We'll do both. We order lesser quantity of catered food and buy our own food to BBQ. Eventually I think it is a good idea as we can have the BBQ food on our Days 2 and 3 of stay as catering is only on Day 1. For catering, I went with Neo Garden as Jonas full month was also with them and we are quite satisfied with their food portion and service. Would like to mention they also do thematic set ups for special occasions at an additional charge.

Besides good food, a birthday party cannot be without a nice cake and some decorations. I have been browsing around for a long time and settled for Cake Avenue which have quite a number of supporters and positive reviews. They also have a Facebook page with many pictures of their cake designs you can take a look if interested. I'll post the birthday cake with my review after the event. As for the deco, I'll be doing something really simple. Rather then explaining, I think I will just post the pics after the event. Bought the deco materials today. :)

Location checked. Catering checked. Birthday cake checked. Deco checked. Now with most arrangements in place, we only need to go and get the birthday pressie. Counting down 4 more days to the big day....