Parties + Decorating

I cannot believe my baby boy is almost one! It is crazy!

I am in the process of making a slideshow for his party, and I am amazed at how time has gone by so fast! And yes, I will admit, I have started his birthday planning way too early!

I love to throw parties...I love to decorate, bake, and have as many people over as I can. The one thing that always comes with parties, though...is the need for money. Having a husband in Seminary, working one day a week, and me home with the baby makes for not a ton of extra cash floating around. So most of the time when I want to throw a party, I am determined to search around my house to find whatever I can to decorate with.

Most of the time my parties default to whatever I already own, and that's okay. However, with my little guy's first birthday arriving in a couple months...I am realizing more and more that most of what I own is really girly! Trying to turn girly things into something masculine is always interesting. I have turned to the hubby to keep everything in check when it comes to the manly decor I come up with. A few things I have heard over the last week: "Julie, you can't use flowers, or at least not those flowers, way too girly" and "Lace? At a boy's birthday? Not going to work," and last night I got "Could you add some brown?" Okay, I get it--it looks girly! But it is all a work in progress, another reason I started so early!

All this to say, as much as I love to decorate and host parties, I am also often convicted of my need to meet the world's standard of what parties are suppose to look like today. Now days we live in a world of Pinterest perfect parties. I am one who deeply loves to decorate and wish I had endless money to do so. I don't think there is anything wrong with using your creativity, but at the same time there is a fine balance between what is me just decorating and what is me trying to meet a Pinterest standard. It is so easy to look on Pinterest and quickly feel unhappy with the things we have since it feels as if so many others have so much more stuff, talent, resources, money, whatever it may be. This is my battle every time I take it upon myself to throw a party. I start off super excited to use my creativity to come up with something extraordinary, but eventually over time I often (not always) find myself bummed that I don't have as much as she does, can't buy this or that, or just feel I don't have the creativity others have. It is sad to know we live in a world in which the standard is perfection.

So this year, I will tell myself again... what my party looks like does not matter. It does not matter to all the friends who truly care about my son and celebrating him, it does not matter to my husband, it does not matter to my son one bit, and more importantly it does not matter to God. What the world says I should be is not the standard I am meant to meet. Instead, what is going to matter is the people who we get to spend time with and the celebration of my son and the miraculous God who created him. I am excited to have our son's village come around him and celebrate him and his first year on this earth, and whatever the party looks like in the end, well... who cares?! I'm determined to just enjoy the process!