lions and tigers and birthdays, oh my!

Aj's birthday is in February and two of his little buddies of the same age have February birthdays, so we did a triple party and invited the whole of both families instead of just the boys and their other friends. These three particular birthday boys are all rather rambunctious, (read: insanely energetic, curious, adventuresome and wild to the core) so a jungle themed party seemed perfect.

I thought AJ and I could work together on the decorations for a little creative activity during the week. I cut some craft foam in animal print shapes and hot glued them onto cardboard to make jumbo sized stamps.  

 

We got a roll of white wrapping paper and brown craft paper then stamped zebra and cheetah prints. We used green and orange construction paper for tiger and alligator prints. I’m not going to lie, we were both very frustrated with each other by the end of this project, but by golly, we did it TOGETHER! I then used the stamped paper & some raffia to make pendant banners. (You can see how they turned out in photos of the cake at the end of the post.)

After that AJ chattered at me and played with Legos while I did most of the decorating by myself (possibly discovering a repressed Prom Decoration Committee Chairperson somewhere deep in my psyche). I made a crepe paper waterfall secret entrance to our downstairs....

He handed me leaves and tape as we put up big palm trees around the family room. (Notice the trees in the backgrounds of the game photos. the trunks are brown paper & the leaves are cut from cheap plastic table clothes.) We decided that to justify spending so much time on the decorations, we’d move them into his room after the party since he doesn’t really have any decorations in his room yet.

One of the other birthday boy’s mom is also a USU grad (GO AGGIES!) in the visual arts, and if I were assembling the Ultimate Party Planning Committee of the Universe, she’d be one of my first picks. Luckily it is the dead of winter here so the party HAD to be indoors, and she was crazy busy this week, or the party might have been ridiculously over the top with the two of us working together. She was in charge of games and I was over decorations and food. Some of the things that qualify my friend to be a member of the Party Planning Dream Team are her boundless creativity, “nothing is impossible” attitude, entertaining sense of humor, and the fact that she owns 500 ping pong balls. She printed animal faces and glued them to shoe boxes which we used to play life-sized Hungry Hungry Hippos with those 500 ping pong balls!!! It was so hilarious.

We handed out safari maps and the classic toilet paper roll homemade binoculars. Then the kids hunted for hidden plastic jungle animals. The birthday boys REALLY loved this.

We next split into two teams and had a Coconut Clash. This involved reams of waded up paper (i.e. the coconuts), a taped line down the middle of the room, and lots of squealing and giggling as we tried to get the most coconuts on the other team’s side of the room. The dads really loved this one.

Finally we had a wild animal dance off with jungle animal masks (everyone is less inhibited behind a mask). Somebody would shout out an animal and we’d have to dance like that animal might dance. The masks were made of craft foam or plastic and, MAN they got sweaty when we were boogying. The silly big sisters loved this activity.

We made a palm tree piñata and went for the pull string kind instead of the whacking kind considering the intensity of these particular birthday boys. Candy is candy and everyone was pleased.

Dinner was pizza, “Jungle Juice”, and “Safari Salad” (that is a blue Jello river, mandarin orange section banks, banana slices palm tree trunks & green apple palm fronds!)

I decided cupcakes topped with plastic jungle animals, but presented with pizzazz would be just as good as an elaborate cake this time. I was happy with the results.

and so were the adorable birthday boys!!

The whole night was a grand success! I wish you each could have been there to celebrate with us.