Roman’s Wild ONE Birthday Party

I can’t believe my baby is ONE! We celebrated with a Wild One birthday party with close family and friends, and it was so, so sweet!

While I was running around setting up for Roman’s birthday party, Omied said, “Next year, can you think about taking things down a notch?” I was like, “This is me taking it down a notch!” If you’ll recall, I did a lot of the setup for our travel-themed baby shower…and I was 8 months pregnant lol.

So yeah, this was me keeping it “low key” hahah.

I am NOT a morning person, but even after a full day at BottleRock on Friday, Saturday AM I woke up before my alarm at 6:30am, ready to start setting up for Roman’s party. I was just so excited!!

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When I was Googling around for first birthday party ideas, I instantly fell in love with the Wild One theme. There’s just so much you can do with it, from the cake, to the decor, to the games! It would also make a cute baby shower theme, like “A little wild one is on the way.”

I’m linking everything throughout the post, including decor (hi, Amazon) and Canva templates I made for the invites and more, so you can use them too.

Wild One Birthday Invites

Canva makes it so dang easy to make the cutest birthday invites in literal minutes. If you want to get them printed, they also make that super easy too and you can pick them up at a nearby Staples.

But to keep things easy, I just downloaded the invite as a jpg and emailed it out to family and friends.

Here’s the Wild One bday invitation template if you’d like to use it too!

Wild One Birthday Cake

Our cake is from our favorite, SusieCakes! As per usual, they absolutely crushed it with this adorable lion design and pastel green frosting to match the color scheme. We always go with their classic Celebration Cake—it’s just too good!

I added some little animal friends and a Wild One cake topper, and I love how it turned out.

Balloon Arch and Photo Backdrop

Ok let’s talk about the balloon arch, aka my piece de resistance. Isn’t she cute?? I learned a lot from trying to DIY a balloon arch for my sister’s bridal shower and it not turning how I expected/taking a lot longer. Here are my tips:

1. Definitely get a balloon inflator pump and test it beforehand to make sure it works with your balloons. Last time I had a pump, but it didn’t work with my balloons for whatever reason. This year, I got this one and it worked great. Gamechanger not to have to inflate orally lol.
2. Only inflate your balloons about halfway to 3/4 full, max. Especially if your balloon arch will be outside, the air is going to expand. At my sister’s bridal shower, the balloons were popping all day long. But this time around, since I had wised up, we only had one balloon pop all day!
3. Get a bendable balloon arch stand. This one was so perfect and easy to use.
4. If you’re using a fabric backdrop, iron it first. Trust me, makes a big difference! And you’ll want an adjustable backdrop stand like this one.
5. Enlist the help of family or friends to blow up and tie the balloons. You can do it the evening before the party. (Thanks, mom and dad! 😉

Shop everything you need for a wild one balloon arch below (click the arrows to scroll through):

She cute!! I love a good photo backdrop! I added a #1 marquee light and some inflatable animals. Gotta say I’m pretty proud of how my DIY balloon arch turned out!

Signage & Extra Touches

I love little touches like custom signage that match the theme. Or how about these beautiful champagne bottle wraps from Beau Bottles??

I made lots of little signs for the drinks area (“watering hole”) and a menu that said “Do not feed the animals” with “Do not” crossed out. 😉

Oh and yes we did Circus Animal cookies for party favors—you can get them on Amazon! They were so freaking good.

You can grab the Canva template here for these signs—don’t forget to get some sign holders too.

Games for a Wild One Birthday Party

Some of our best friends have kids who are a little older, like 3 – 7, so I wanted to make sure we had some fun things for them to do. We did a piñata (easy and a big hit), and I printed out coloring books with jungle animals and added their names to the books to make them feel special. Grab the Jungle animal coloring book template here.

My favorite game that I came up with was Safari Bingo! I made this Safari Bingo on Canva and put a bunch of animals and other things I could think of that I knew would be out and around at the party, gave the kids some animal stickers, and they went wild! Be sure to have a prize, that was the first thing one of the girls asked was if there was a prize lolol I was like of course there’s a prize, what do you take me for??

I didn’t get a pic of these but I also got a bunch of jungle animal tattoos and those were extremely popular with the kids. Like I had no idea how crazy they’d go over the tattoos, but I loved that they loved them!

Smash Cake

Roman definitely doesn’t need all the sugar in a regular cake just yet, so I baked him his own little smash cake. Here’s the recipe I used—it was super easy, and he loved it. This kid loves berries, so I knew it’d be a hit.

Wild One Bday Decor

While of course the balloon arch/photo backdrop was the big one, we had lots of cute wild one decor sprinkled around.

No matter what your theme is for your little one’s first birthday, you have to do a 12 month banner where you have a pic from each month. I absolutely sobbed picking out the photos for this. He was so little!! This one comes with a “one wild year” banner to go above it, so cute haha, and was it ever.

Shop wild one bday decor below (click the arrows to scroll through):

Outfits

Oh, and because we love a theme, we invited everyone to dress in tropical or animal print. SO fun. My dress is from Petal and Pup! Sandals are Lulu’s.

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We also dressed up Roman before the party and did a little photoshoot in this Where The Wild Things Are outfit. You guys, I wish I felt comfortable showing his face online because OH EM GEE it was too cute. But a pic with his little booty and tail will have to do!

For his party, we changed him into this adorable khaki short set from Carter’s that reminded me of a safari outfit. Of course, we had to do one more outfit change after the smash cake, and we put him in a casual jungle animal shirt.

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That’s all the deets on our little wild one’s first birthday! Thanks to all our friends and fam for a wild time! 😉

Shop all the Wild ONE birthday things below: