For my son's 2nd birthday we decided to go with a Dinosaur theme. It was a simple choice as not only did he show a great fondness for dinosaurs, but it is such a fun and easy theme to work with. I just had to have a go! :)
As dinosaurs are so popular with children, there is no end to the supplies and merchandise that you can find available to stock up for your dinosaur party. Bonus! Try $2 shops to stock up on cheap plastic dinosaur toys and other such items.
One of the things I loved the most about putting on this Dinosaur Party was decorating the house with as many potted ferns and plants as I could get my hands on. We used a lot from around our own yard and borrowed some from family members for the party. It was a really quick and easy way to transform our house into a bit of a jungle! The Dinosaur Dig activity was also a highlight. It kept the kids busy for a lot longer than anticipated and was incredibly easy to set up. We had the cutest loot bag goodies ever, thanks to our friends at Micador, and I found that dinosaur themed food was really easy to come up with and a lot of fun! All in all, it was a fabulous theme and we were delighted with how it all came together.
Here are some pics from our day.
Food
Savoury Food
Herbivore Cups AKA Hummus dip in mini plastic shot-glass with vegetable sticks
T-Rex Rolls AKA sausage rolls
Pterodactyl wings AKA marinated chicken wings
Sweet Food
Tree branches AKA chocolate dipped grissini bread sticks. I saw this awesome idea for chocolate grissini wands and thought with a few alterations they'd make excellent tree branches. So easy to make, they look cool and they are actually really yum too!
The dinosaur jellies were made in a cake mould and were probably the most annoying of all the food to prepare and I had a number of failures. They looked cool though. As I couldn't make enough for everyone to have one, I did some simple layered jelly cups (like we did in our Rainbow party) with a lolly dinosaur on top.
Dirt cups AKA a layer of red jelly, a layer of crushed Oreos (you needs lots if you don't want it to be covered by the chocolate custard like ours), a layer of chocolate custard, crushed choc-chip cookies sprinkled on top and a gummy worm to finish them off. Deceptively delicious.
Drinks
Swamp Juice AKA chocolate milk
Jungle Juice AKA fruit punch with fresh cut fruit
The Cake
The cake was three layers in total. 2 layers of chocolate cake and one peppermint choc-chip layer in the centre. Between the layers was chocolate ganache.
To decorate I roughly iced the outside with basic chocolate icing to give a rough, dirt look. I made the little dinosaur topper out of some ready-roll icing that I dyed and then moulded (sort of like you would with clay). It did require some wire in it to support the weight of the head and was definitely a time consuming part. (The dinosaur is modelled off the dinosaur that you see on the food labels. This dinosaur design came from Noah's dinosaur party invitation that I purchased from Less Ordinary designs.)
I purchased some "chocolate rocks" from a sweet shop to decorate the cake with and I made the little banner using a couple of paper straws, some fishing line and some flags that I made on the computer in a Word doc.
Decorating
Setting the scene for this party was not difficult at all. I stuck to a jungle type feel with lots of green and brown. Live plants gave it a really nice feel and I filled in the rest with green "jungle-vine" streamers, banana leaf on the platters, Hessian material and quickly made green jungl-ish decorations. I also printed a dinosaur footprint template and then cut the prints out of black paper and then laminated them for durability. They began in the driveway and went up into the house.
Welcome and come in :)
My Uncle had previously made the dinosaur canvas art for Noah. Lucky us!
We actually left all the plants inside our house for a good week after the party. If only my house could always have that many plants. Did you spot any of the dinosaur wall stickers? They are still everywhere in our house :)
Dinosaur Party Activities
I decided for this particular party, just to have some simple "activities" that were open-ended and meant the kids could entertain themselves without me having to run any specific games. I set up a Dino Dig on the balcony, some Dinosaur Colouring with dinosaur colouring sheets that I got off the net and our dino markers, a Dinosaur Small World and a Dinosaur Book corner.
Dino Dig
Inside the sand-pit I buried a complete skeleton (which came in lots of parts) that I had from when I taught a Dinosaur Unit in my classroom (I bought it from National Geographic). I also popped in some other small plastic dinosaurs and set out various "palaeontologist" and "dinosaur hunting" tools.
Dinosaur Colouring
I found these free dinosaur colouring sheets on Kidspot and printed out a bunch of different ones. To make it even more fun we set out our Dinosaur Besties markers.
Dinosaur Book Corner
We had a number of Dinosaur books already but that week all the books we borrowed from the library were about dinosaurs!
Dinosaur World
In our sand/water table I put a fresh batch of green playdough and a whole lot of dinosaur figurines and props.
Let's Party
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| Happy 2nd Birthday to our gorgeous little boy. We love you more than words can describe xox |
Dinosaur Treat Bags
I love to give a fun treat bag to all the kids as they leave the party but usually they've eaten plenty of sweet treats at the party so I try to find things besides lollies to fill the bags with. This DIY playdough treat bag we did last year is still really popular.
This year our guests got really lucky as our blog pARTner, Micador had just released some awesome Dino crayons, which I just had to have! When I enquired about them they generously provided us with a range of really cool dinosaur themed items for our party.
I set up the take-home bags and items on low tables in the entrance so that children could go along it as they left and collect their goodies for their bag.
I bought plain white paper craft bags and then printed out name labels on the computer. Using some jagged scissors I cut out some colour paper to decorate them with. I wasn't worried about them being perfect, the rough look fits in well with a dinosaur theme and the bags were really quick and easy to do.
I can't help it that the Natural Confectionery Company make dinosaur shaped lollies. I consented and allowed them to take home some sweets in a small DIY plastic bag. haha
We already had our own set of Dino Besties markers and love them so much that I really wanted my guests to take home one each.
The Dino Crayons aren't just fun to draw with. You can play with them and they make really cool fossil imprints in clay and playdough!
The Clouds Modelling Foam made awesome Dinosaur Eggs!
I cut up some large sheets of Dinosaur Wall Decals so that the kids could take home one each. We also decorated our house with some of our own.
I purchased some small sets of Dinosaur board books from various shops. (No one shop I went to had enough of them but if you look well, you can find them all over the place.) Each set came with around 4-6 mini board books in it and worked out to be around $1 per book.
Thanks for Coming
Thanks to all our family and friends for coming and giving our little boy such a special day. At the end of the day, your presence is much more important than your presents and much more important than themed food and decorations.
Another birthday done and dusted.
If you're interested, here are the previous birthday parties we've shared:
Happy partying,
Debs :)
{Disclosure: I was not paid for this post. Our guests were generously gifted with some items for their goodie bags (which we love and wanted anyway.) I was under no obligation to share where they came from but I wanted to provide people with access to them if they wanted, (because they're so cool! haha.) As always, all the opinions on this blog are my own and that of my children}
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