Should I Throw a First Birthday Party for My Second Baby? Practical Parenting Tips
It’s 10:17pm, my coffee’s gone lukewarm, and I’m scrolling through Instagram while 10-month-old Milo chews on the edge of my laptop. My phone pings: my sister-in-law, asking for the address to Milo’s first birthday party next month. I stare at the text for three minutes, then lock my phone. I still haven’t decided if we’re having one.
For Lila, my oldest, her first birthday was a three-week project. I handmade tissue paper palm trees for a dinosaur jungle theme, ordered a custom banner that said “Lila’s Roaring First Year,” baked a three-layer smash cake from scratch, and invited 28 people. I cried when she accidentally knocked over the cake, posted 47 photos to my feed, and spent the next week putting together a leather-bound memory book. This time around, I found a half-eaten cheese cracker in my jacket pocket this morning, and I forgot to refill the toilet paper three days in a row. The idea of blocking off three afternoons for party prep makes me want to take a nap just thinking about it.
I’ve scrolled dozens of parent forums where half the people say “skip it, they won’t remember anyway” and the other half say you’re shortchanging your second kid if you don’t celebrate them the same as the first. I felt guilty either way: guilty for being too tired to pull off the big party, guilty for even considering skipping a milestone that matters. Then came the moment that changed my mind.
Last Saturday, I was testing a vanilla cake recipe for a possible smash cake, and 3-year-old Lila wandered into the kitchen. She prodded the raw batter with her finger and asked, “Is this my cake?” I said no, it’s for Milo’s birthday, and her face crumpled. “Why does he get a cake? I never get cakes anymore,” she said, and sat down on the floor and cried. I sat down with her, wiped her nose on my sleeve, and asked her what she remembers about her own first birthday. She stopped crying, thought for a minute, and said “I got the big purple teddy bear, and we had pink sprinkles, and Grandma came.” She doesn’t actually remember it, of course—she was 1. But it’s her story. We talk about her first birthday sometimes when we flip through photo albums, it’s a part of how she knows she’s loved and important in our family.
That’s when I realized the party isn’t for the 1-year-old. They’re not going to remember it, no matter how big or fancy you make it. It’s for all of us: to mark that this little person is just as much a part of our family as the first, and to show the older sibling already figuring out their new place that everyone gets their turn to be celebrated. Kids Lila’s age are hyper-attuned to fairness, even if they can’t name that feeling. A tiny, thrown-together party that honors the second baby’s milestone matters more to the older sibling than it does to the baby, and skipping it can leave them with a quiet sense that the new kid gets less, which means they might be next.
But that doesn’t mean you have to copy your first party word for word. I ended up landing on a middle ground that’s worked for us, and it took way less energy than I expected. First, I picked three small traditions we did for Lila’s first birthday and kept those exactly the same, no cutting corners. The traditions are: mark their height on the kitchen wall with a pencil and write their name and birthday next to it; take a photo of them holding the same worn teddy bear we brought home from the hospital with each kid; and their smash cake gets covered entirely in sprinkles, no fancy frosting designs required. Everything else, I adjusted to fit our current life.
Next, I let Lila lead three small parts of the planning. She picked the theme (Bluey, obviously, since that’s what the two of them watch together every morning), got to blow up all the balloons, and was in charge of sprinkling the smash cake. That kept her involved, instead of making her feel like she’s just a side character at her sibling’s party. I kept the guest list to 7 people: my parents, Lila’s favorite babysitter, and my brother’s two kids. No distant cousins, no coworkers, no people I felt obligated to invite just because I did it last time. The whole thing cost less than $50, and I spread prep out over two afternoons, 90 minutes each, so I never felt overwhelmed.
The party was last Saturday. Milo napped 20 minutes longer than expected, so we started 20 minutes late. He cried for the first minute of happy birthday, because everyone was singing too loud. When we put the smash cake down in front of him, he immediately grabbed it by the sides and rubbed it into his hair. Lila yelled “I helped put the sprinkles on!” to everyone, and then helped Milo lick frosting off his fingers when he got confused. I took 29 photos, not 172, and I haven’t printed any of them yet. We didn’t do party favors, and half the chips got eaten by our dog before anyone could serve them.
I still get that little twinge of guilt sometimes, when I see someone’s over-the-top second baby first birthday on Instagram. I know some people have the energy for that, and that’s fine, but I don’t. What I didn’t expect was how much focusing on the small, consistent things mattered more than the size. Lila hasn’t stopped talking about how she planned Milo’s birthday, and when we marked his height on the wall, she pointed to her own 1-year mark and told everyone “That was me when I was a baby, and now it’s Milo’s turn.”
Milo won’t remember any of this. When he’s Lila’s age, he’ll probably ask to see photos of his first birthday, and we’ll show him the messy cake photos, and he’ll hear the story of how Lila put all the sprinkles on. His pencil mark on the wall is just as dark as Lila’s, right there next to it. We didn’t do everything the same, but we did the most important things the same. That’s enough, for right now.
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