When I had written a short update on the morning of Aerin’s dol, I had been worried about Hurricane Sandy’s impact on the party.

But while we could not hold my younger daughter’s first birthday at a banquet hall as we had originally planned…

And more than half of our guests could not make it due to the impending storm…

(Together with the fact that we ended the party early in hopes that everyone will get home safely…)

We ended up having a great time.  😀

First, the decorations. I only decorated our dining area (we don’t exactly have a dining room, per se) because I only had one week to plan and prepare everything.

As stated in a previous post, I had DIY’ed Aerin’s dol towers using beans glued onto paper towel rolls. Those suckers were a lot of work, y’all! I stayed up late every night in the week preceding the party to finish each tower — if I had more time, I would have made some additional ones with colorful gumballs and/or other candy, but this was all I could do on our tight deadline.