A cool 1st birthday tradition

I lived in Korea for a number of years and my friend just posted up pics of her son's first birthday. Because Korea traditionally had a high rate of infant mortality getting to your first birthday is a big deal ergo there's a big party.

The highlight of the party is whenlow table is brought out for the baby with several items on it which represent the path the child’s future life will take if she or he grabs it. Typically the following items are used.

A pencil: Which means the child will be a scholarly academic.
Money: Which means the child will be wealthy.
A string: Which means the child will live a long life.
A bowl of rice: Which means the child will have food and shelter.

However, nowadays people have included new and modern items like the following:

A microphone: Which means the child will be a singer
A Mouse: Which means the child will be a computer genius!

But you could really use anything signifcant to your family.

Anyone else got any cool first birthday traditions.

Lol that could be quite entertaining!
A friend of min took a large peice of paper and stuck a photo of her son smack in the middle. She then had everybody at the 1st birthday write a wee message on it for her child, and stuck it in a frame to hang on his wall. Cool idea, not really a tradition though I guess.

I lvoe the photo by a tree idea too :) We have just built a place, and it would be neat to do that next to a new tree, so they could bother grow in the photos, but what if we move :S

Haven't written all the responses, but every year ,since her first birthday , I write a letter to Caitlyn on the eve of her birthday , it has bits about what she did that year etc etc , and I put a pic of her from that year in it , I have them all in a box and i'll give them to her when she turns 21 ....whether she likes it or not .....

Wow some neat ideas! We don't have any traditions or anything for the younger birthdays but since the older ones started school I have made a tradition of picking up the birthday boy/girl from school and taking them out to lunch just the two of us to somewhere of their choice. Today my eldest turned 12 and I am beginning to wonder if/when he will decide he doesn't want to go for lunch with his mum!

We do the charm bracelet too - the first charm was apussy cat cos Gabrielle loves animals. Think her 2nd charm will be something to do with music or cooking.

Need a similar tradition to that for Tane though... ideas?

We also have a notebook for each of the kidlets that I started writing in wehn I was pregnant, I write in it every few months and on bdays and christmas as well - the idea is that they will be given to them on their 21sts.

Peanut - thats a great idea about the tool box! I think we will do that for Tane too!

we had our DD first birthday in July and decided to that every birthday we would make feet and hand prints of our daughter and put them in a book and when she gets older we will give the book to her to show how much she has grown.