Birthday party photo collage

If I'm honest, we weren't really intending to have a family birthday party for Tommy this year (which sounds awful!) but with us being away for Tommy's actual birthday, it didn't seem right somehow to be celebrating either a week before or after the big day itself. However, because Tommy's birthday has always fallen on a weekday and the fact my parents live a few hours away, we've usually ended up having a family get together either the weekend before or after it anyway, so it only seemed right that we did the same this year.

I usually go completely overboard when it comes to Tommy's birthday party. If you follow me on Instagram and go back a year in square pictures, you'll see Tommy's 3rd birthday cake - all 3 tiers of it. I made 3 gigantic tiers of cake. It took me days. My blood, sweat and tears went into it (metaphorically-speaking of course). I think 16 or so people came to Tommy's birthday party and the cake would have fed 50 or so. I literally begged people to take a slice or two home. Most of it ended up in the staffroom at my school. From that moment on, I vowed never to go over the top again in terms of food for parties. What I did need to do, however, was up my game in terms of my hostess skills.

I'll be writing a post on Tommy's 4th birthday cake soon (if I make a half-decent job of it, that is!) but I thought I'd share with you a simple idea you might use for a children's birthday party - a photo collage made up of photos from each year of your child's life.

Luckily, this was pretty straight forward for us, as I am VERY snap-happy, own a smartphone that I take everywhere and make sure I use my FreePrints every single month. I've also been uncharacteristically organised and super-geeky about organizing my photos, documenting where/when they were taken and how old each child was at the time. I just figure it will be lovely to look back on one day and help stimulate my memory when I'm old and wrinkly - it's already not the best!

It was lovely to look back on photos of when Tommy was tiny, to see how much he'd grown and changed. Since Isla was born, Tommy has been asking a lot about what he was like as a baby, what we thought about him, whether we remember when he was tiny and so it's been lovely to go through his old baby photos with him. It's easy for older siblings to feel a bit pushed out when a new baby arrives and talking about them when they were a baby and getting out the old photo albums can help to put them at ease and remind them how special and loved they are.

We chose our favourite photographs and then stuck them on our door in order from youngest to oldest. I intended to organise them in the shape of a number 4 originally, but the space provided by our door was too small. Next year I might organise them on a large wall instead to enable me to do this. All our guests really enjoyed looking at the photos and it brought back so many happy memories for us as well as them.