Hands down, my favorite theme thus far. I was struggling with a theme for Lucas’ first birthday. It was about a month before his birthday and I still had no clue about a theme, location, date, etc. I blame the planning procrastination to my mixed feelings that comes with being a mom to the last baby - The ‘firsts’ of motherhood are exciting, but the ‘lasts’ are so bittersweet. You just want to hold on to the last “firsts” forever. But, I knew I was in a time crunch and had to figure out a theme as quickly as possible so that the invitations can be designed and mailed out. As I was searching for ideas on Pinterest, I accidently stumbled upon a photo of one of Christopher Wallace’s (aka: Notorious BIG / Biggie Smalls) words “It’s all good baby baby” on a backdrop. I began searching for ideas on how to incorporate this theme for a 1st birthday. After a day of researching, the final decision was made and so the Notorious LUC theme was born.

First step in any party planning is figuring out location and date. Once the location is set, designing or ordering invitations follows. And, the invitation part is seriously my absolute favorite part of events. I get so creative with invitations that I bring them to life as part of the theme. Long story short, I had booked the party at a park but ended up falling on super bowl (can you tell I don’t watch sports) so I had to cancel and my husband suggested we have the party at our house.

As soon as the location, date, and theme were finalized, I started working on the invitations. I wanted the invitation to imitate one of Biggie’s famous albums “ready to die”. So, I ordered black vinyl CD-Rs to make it look like vinyl records. I printed custom round labels for them and made the cd sleeves using my Silhouette America program. With a simple assembly they turned out to be the coolest invitations I’ve ever done - just like the original album. If I had more time, I would’ve recorded Lucas’ coos, sounds and words onto the cds.

After the invitations were mailed out, I began pinning ideas and ordering all the decorations. Most of the decorations were from Amazon (I will tag all the direct links below). I kept the colors to black/white/gold for the most part. Due to the weather conditions (it rained all week and all day on the day of the party), I had to cancel the bouncy house and moved all the outside decorations and tables inside. It truly felt like a 90’s type of birthday with classic games like twister, simon says, freeze dance, jumbo jenga and more. It turned out better than I imagined - very chill, cozy and full of love and laughter with our immediate friends and families.

Check out all the photos below. Also, the sources will be all the way at the bottom of the post. Enjoy!