Half birthdays - Yay or Nay?

HALF BIRTHDAYS! Have you heard of these before? It's basically celebrating the fact that 6 months ago your baby was just a newborn and in only another 6 months, that little person will be turning ONE already (I'm not crying, you are! 🧅).

As a first-time mum, my journey has been an eye-opener filled with love and gratitude, not just for my little one, but for the incredible village that surrounds us. A half birthday was the perfect occasion for us to gather, catch up and celebrate with our closest people - after all, we just survived the first 6 months of taking care of this little human 👶.

Time, they say, is a thief. It keeps slipping away while you aren't looking, especially when you are caught up trying to "parent". For that reason, we agreed to soak up every tiny moment - the good, the not-so-good and everything in between - because we know that life's too short and children grow up so so quick! I stumbled upon a quote last time that pinched me in my heart, it was something a little like this:

There is going to be a time when it's
the last time you rock your baby to sleep,
the last time you pick your kid up,
the last time you hold their hand to cross the road,
And you won't even realise it was the last time you were doing it...

As we get more and more busy, we can easily forget how precious these moments spent with baby can be, and how quick they move from one stage to the next (remember these cute Moro reflexes? 🙃). So make every moment count: Celebrate their 100 days, celebrate their half birthdays, celebrate their first tooth if you want to 😁!

Now you may be thinking that a half birthday or a first birthday is a waste of time? and money? Because no 6 months old (not even a one year old) is going to remember it... And that's a very fair point! But here's the thing, in my honest opinion, these celebrations are more for us, the parents, than it is for the baby! And we certainly DO remember (or at least I will 😊)...

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Here's how we celebrated our little bub's half birthday:

THEME
At home, we like to plan our parties around a theme, it makes it easier to make these important life decisions like:

• What colour plates are we getting?
• Do we need balloons?
• What design are we doing for cake?
• Why is baby eating this Taylor Swift concert ticket? WAIT WHAT?!?!

​Anywayyyy, we decided to go for a Panda theme - because half-white, half-black - and it's adorable, plus us parents could proudly flash the dark circles under our eyes and say that we dressed to theme 🐼!

DRESS UP
We dressed our halfy (yeah, let's call her that) in an adorable Panda onesie (of course!) and asked all the guests to dress in black and white... Looking back now, it looked like we were all headed to a goth concert lol.

HALF BIRTHDAY CAKE
Of course right? There's always, always, ALWAYS a reason for cake! Instead of having a full round cake, half birthdays are extra special because you can get one in a semi-circle, it will look super cute on your dessert table! Half the cake, double the fun! 🥳

FOOD
It was also quite fun (for me at least 😂) to cut our party food in half! Our food table looked a lot more loaded, but really we just made 1 become 2. It also meant that there was less wastage and the guests got to sample a variety of party food before getting too full.

GAMES
Nothing says party like some super duper silly games! And we organised a handful of games (including trivia, "guess-the-half-recipe", some quirky maths homework and more) to entertain our grown-ass adults while our baby Panda was catching up on some beauty sleep.

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As new parents, we are aiming to make it a habit of marking all the milestones of our little one and our lives - time is racing forward and life is way too short to wait for "big moments" only. So here's to celebrating half birthdays, to ordinary moments turned into extraordinary memories, and to a life well-lived, one celebration at a time. What about you? What are your thoughts on Half birthdays? Yay or Nay?