It's official. He's one.

We had Ben's first birthday party on Sunday and it was a lot of work fun!

When Ben was just a few weeks old, I found cookie cutters at IKEA that were shaped like forest animals . . . one of which was a hedgehog. You might remember that I really wanted to do a nursery for Ben with a hedgehog theme, but hedgehog baby stuff was tough to find (imagine that). So instead, it blossomed into an idea for a birthday party. I scoured the Internet and found some great ideas for the party!

But my last minute trip to see Oprah set me behind and I never really caught up. While most people looked at the party and probably thought everything looked great, all I could see was everything that I didn't have time to finish, and the sloppiness of everything I had to rush through. That's how it always goes, right?

I had a cute "Happy Birthday Bennett" banner that was supposed to hang across the room, but it wouldn't stay up. I literally threw everything on the dessert table as guests were arriving. The table cloths weren't ironed, the trees were lopsided and the buffet signs were cut in such a rush that edges were jagged.

I had this plan to put halved mini marshmallows on the red cupcakes to make them look like toadstools . . . but this didn't happen because cutting marshmallows in half is harder than it looks and I ran out of time. The good news there is that Maria made them so they still tasted amazing and looked great even without the marshmallows. If you haven't had a cupcake by Maria, you do NOT know what you're missing. We ate the last one last night, and I'm grieving their absence this afternoon.

On the other hand, the cookies and cake pops that I made . . . well, let's just say that people would have believed that Jack made them with how awful they looked.. I tried to use a new frosting recipe (which was supposed to be a cross between royal icing and buttercream . . . big mistake) for the cookies. And with all the humidity during the week before his birthday, the cake pops cracked and crumbled.

And because it was all being thrown together at the VERY. LAST. MINUTE. I was able to take very few pictures. It wasn't bad. It was just a little sloppy.

But you know what? Bennett didn't care one bit. And I suppose that's what matters.

Here are some of the photos . . . you can see them all here. You'll have to excuse the duck wallpaper border. There are some things you just can't change. You can see all of the photos here.

The birthday boy . . . dressed by his father NOT in the outfit I had picked out for him. I did my best to let it go.

The cupcake stands and the trees in the center of each table were built by Kyle.

Jack "helped" Ben blow out his candle . . .

And boy did he love his cupcake . . .

I wanted to do a birthday video for Ben like I did with Jack, and I think most people assumed that I didn't because we don't have as much video of Ben as we do of Jack . . . which is false. We actually have about twice as much video footage of Ben. It was just all taken on our phones and doesn't translate to a television screen as easily. My plan is still to put one together and post it online. At some point . . .