Portrait Photo: Amelia Johnson Photography

It’s hard to believe a whole year has passed since our little guy entered the world!  We wanted to celebrate his first year of life with friends and family with a fun and colorful backyard bash.  Hudson’s nursery is a menagerie theme with animals in party hats (in mostly white-on-white with accents of soft blues and yellow.)  For this celebration, I wanted to take the same menagerie theme and making it more fun and colorful, and thus the “party animal” theme was born!

Party Photos by: Lisa Ziesing, Abby Jiu Photography

Left: We used this cute towel cabana from Ballard Designs to hold colorful paper cups of goldfish and pirate’s booty for the littles, as well as the animal cracker favor jars.

Right: We DIY’d this sprinkle donut wall as our dessert table back drop using pegboard, blue spray paint and Krispy Kreme!

This stylish striped cabana from Ballard designs did double duty at our dessert table: it kept the sweets from melting in the summer sun AND provided a decorative backdrop!

Left: These personalized straws in glass milk bottles were a fun touch!

Right:  We spent the whole day prior to the party decorating 9 dozen of these jumbo animal crackers my mother-in-law made from scratch!

All goats should wear party hats!  Hudson always gets a silly grin around this cutie, Miss Kennedy Grace!

Zinc galvanized metal tubs from Ballard Designs kept our drinks nice and cool!

These Sundae cake pops from Two Sugars Studio were delish!!

One of his favorite gifts – a baby grand piano!  Hudson appears to be a natural (or at least has watched his dad many times!)  He sat right down and started playing.

Frosted animal crackers in our DIY favor jars that we painted white and attached chalkboard sticker labels to!

It was all good until we tried to put on the hat…

It’s safe to say, this smash cake from Two Sugars Studio got Hudson’s stamp of approval!

P.S – 15 minutes later, after the photographer had put away the camera he was STILL going strong and I managed to capture this goodness on my iPhone:

Special Thanks To…

Lisa Ziesing (Abby Jiu Photography)

Ballard Designs (black and white striped canopies, zinc tubs)

Party Rental LTD – rentals

La Tavola – black and white linens

Two Sugars Studio – cake, smash cake and sundae cake pops

Squeals on Wheels – mini zoo

My hubby – for manning the grill/smoker and being the king of TX BBQ!