I love kid birthday parties! I don't know what it is about them, but I just love celebrating little people and I especially love celebrating my own little people. For Ryan's birthday we hosted a party at our house, which I should say is rather small, measuring in at 770 sq feet. The thought of hosting a party always seems so intimidating, especially in the dead of winter. I mean how are you suppose to fit 20-30 people or more into our rather small home? It's difficult, but we did it for Jack's birthday, so I figured we could do it for Ryan's!
And praise the Lord for Pinterest. What a fantastic tool for party planning! I started pinning all sorts of things and perusing all sorts of photos and I eventually landed on a Woodland Theme since half the party was going to be outside on our deck.
I used this party and this photo as my inspiration.
I started planning and creating things weeks in advance, which is such a great idea, as it made the week leading up to the party and the night before the party so much more enjoyable!
I made a very thorough to do list, complete with tasks to accomplish each day. And it looked a little something like this.
Three weeks before we went to my parents house and I fully utilized the giant pieces of wood they had out back and my grandpas table saw along with their printer as ours is stored in our garage (not very handy for this type of thing, I know!).
Three weeks before the party
- travel to parents house and fully utilize the giant pieces of wood they have at side of house along with grandpas table saw
- fully utilize parents printer as ours is stored in our garage and most likely doesn't have a working ink cartridge
- cut a bunch of wooden rounds in varied sizes
- print out the letters for a banner and put the banner together
- print out the masks
- print out these woodland animal coloring sheets
- print out this Happy Birthday banner for the cupcakes
- stop at the dollar store to buy plates, napkins, cups
- stop at Michael's to buy cardstock and scrapbook paper, and during this trip I also scored some fox/owl cookie cutters
Two weeks before the party
- stop at Target to buy crayons, some straws and black and white twine
- print out Thank you tags for the party favor bags.
One week before the party
- bake Ryan's cake (it was a banana cake), wrap it in saran wrap and freeze it
- bake cupcakes from scratch with this yellow cake recipe and wrap and freeze those
- stop at Fred Meyer to buy more cardstock and popsicle sticks for the masks
- glue the sticks on the back of masks
- bake snickerdoodle cookies for the party favors and use fox and owl cookie cutters
The week of the party/a few nights before
- defrost Ryan's cake and the cupcakes
- make frosting for Ryan's cake and frost it (a dear friend made frosting for cupcakes and frosted them for me!!)
- put the favor bags together with cookies and rice cereal and tie Thank You tags onto them
- bake the breakfast biscuits
- Peter wrote Ryan's stats on chalkboard
- organized and printed photos to hang throughout house and found sticks and pots for table to hang photos
- borrowed a kids table for a craft station
The Decorations
- wooden rounds
- fake trees from Joann's
- candles in mason jars/glassy babies
- birthday banner
- Christmas tree
- animal masks
- chalkboard
- pictures, lots of pictures
- Woodland things like pinecones, fake trees, tree straws
The Menu
- donuts
- cocktail sausages
- these delicious breakfast biscuits (they were so good and super easy!!)
- fruit
- nuts
- cake/cupcakes
- orange juice
- coffee
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