I wanted to share a few pictures from my son’s fourth birthday party. It was a super fun dinosaur party that he’d been anticipating for months. The weather was rather gloomy for LA and seemed to threaten us with rain, fortunately the rain stayed away until the next day, and I think the party lived up to my son’s expectations.
I used some of the ideas from my inspiration board, but also came up with other things. Here are the details:
For food I tried to keep it semi-healthy. While I love the look of a dessert table covered with candy a la Amy Atlas, the truth is I and most parents I know don’t really love our kids to be full of sugar. So for the sweet stuff, besides the cake, I had cupcakes, fossil cookies and grapes in individual cups. For the savory stuff, I had individual cones of Veggie Booty (my son’s fave), mini cups of edamame, and cups with julienned vegetables, some with ranch dip, some without… and of course pizza which seems compulsory for a kids party. I served the latter because most kids eat it, but funnily enough my son doesn’t. The cupcake toppers were created using a template from Paper and Cake on etsy. Then for the fossil cookies I decided to make it super easy on myself and bought ready made sugar cookie dough which I just baked normally, then when the cookies were still warm from the oven I pressed a dinosaur form into them. Presto! Dino fossil cookies without much fuss, but they looked great on the table. I also served chocolate milk in cute vintage-y glass bottles and paper straws from Sweet Lulu.
For fun, I had a bouncy castle, but since there could only be 5-6 kids in there at a time, I figured I needed other activities. I had a “decorate a dino” station, with ready made cut out shapes of different dinos, and buckets of stickers and googley eyes. This station was a hit with the girls who were more into the crafting aspect. I also had the requisite “dino dig”. I filled two galvanized metal buckets with play sand and buried dinosaur skeletons into each of them. Kids then dug them out using sifters and brushes, like mini paleontologists. I’d seen different sites with how-to make your own dino bones, etc, but again I opted for the quickest route since time is not always readily available with a little one just a few months old. I bought a Dino Excavation Kit from Lakeshore Learning, it had the skeletons and the sifters and the brushes. My twist on the dig is that each dino had a number inscribed on it and the number matched a prize in a big bin I had next to the dino dig. As I told some of the parents at the party, as a child I was not one to dig for digging’s sake, so I wanted there to be a reward for the digging, it also made it into more of a game.
Lastly for the goodie bags, everyone left with personalized bags filled with dino loot. From dino stickers, dinosaur toy and a treat bag filled with chocolate rocks and a mini dinosaur, topped off with a matching tag. Unfortunately I don’t have pictures of the the dino chocolate rock bags, but I heard back from some parents and I know they were well received. Imagine eating rocks, how cool
Happy Birthday my big boy! Hope it was memorable.
p.s. My son’s personalized T-shirt was from Priceless Kids yet another etsy vendor.
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