Happy Birthday DIYFather.com

Today is a special day - it's Father's Day in NZ and Australia, YAY! But it's also the first anniversary for DIYFather.com as we launched this site on Father's Day 2007. What a year it's been. DIYFather.com now hosts over 750 articles specifically written for dads. Every month the site gets 30'000 visits and more than 40'000 people are listening to our International Dad podcasts.

So a big shout out to all the dads around the world who are reading and writing our articles. This is your site and we are proud to have helped in putting it together. Also a special shout out to the many other father's blogs who are linking to us and have helped us make the site into what it is today with lots of feedback and suggestions. Thanks also to all the organisations who have started working with us over the last 12 months. We have benefitted so much from your experience and help! A special hello also to all the mums contributing to this blog - it's always great to hear from you. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, lots of love to all (our) children without whom we wouldn't be fathers in the first place.

Celebrating the first birthday

What an amazing milestone for mum and dad, and what a fantastic event to celebrate for your baby - the first birthday! I couldn't believe how quickly it came round ... after all the new experiences, dramas, joys, late nights and special moments we suddenly realised Noah's first birthday was just round the corner. Right away I thought - yay, let's celebrate!

Organising a birthday party for a one-year-old actually required more preparation than I thought. First of all space might be an issue. We wanted to have all our friends + babies round but the weather didn't really allow for an outdoors option, so things got a bit squeezed in our living room. Friends of ours hired a kindi on a Saturday which seemed like a sensible option.

The second issue was food. We wanted to make sure that we had sensible food for our friends and their babies. So we baked quite a few cakes but also prepared some fruit and baby sandwiches.

Great first birthday project

Matt over at dearspike.com told me about a project he started to celebrate the upcoming first birthday of his daughter "Spike". I thought ... what a wonderful idea so I decided to re-blog it here with his kind permission.

It's great to get an overview of ideas for the first birthday - as the one for my son is approaching as well. It seems just impossible that I've been a dad now for nearly a year. You look from one day to the next - managing all the small and big crises and before you know it ... a year has passed. *sigh*

Anyway - here it goes:

Dear Spike's Friends:

Spike's first birthday will be here soon. All fretting aside about WHERE THE HELL THE PAST 10 MONTHS WENT, I would like to enlist your help in putting together THE GREATEST BIRTHDAY PRESENT OF ALL TIME.

No, it's not a pony.