The Owl turned five last week, which is still totally blowing my mind. I can’t believe my sweet little guy is growing up so fast! This is first year we’ve done a proper party- in the past we’ve done little family parties paired with a special outing. But this year we decided to have a party with friends, goodie bags, the whole deal. When asked what he wanted, The Owl requested a party at home with a Diego Dinosaur theme. I was happy about having the party at home (well, besides the cleaning part) since we were on a very small budget, but the Diego theme left me stumped. Dinosaurs I could work with, but I wasn’t sure what to do beyond that, and I couldn’t find any ideas on the web that combined the two- plenty of Diego jungle parties, but he had specifically requested dinosaur.
Well, all it took was for me to pay attention to the Diego’s Great Dinosaur Rescue movie, and I was hit with inspiration! In the film, Diego, Dora and Alicia visit a museum, where they learn about a lost Maiasaura. They then travel back to the time of the dinosaurs to find Maia that Maiasaura and lead her back home to her nest. I decided to use that as the overall plan for our party, and to re-create the dinosaur rescue mission.
I’ll try to take you through the whole party and the planning process, and I’ll include as many links and photos as I have.
The invitations:
I created the invitation in PhotoShop from a Diego image I found online. I’m not sure the original source of the image, but if you do a google image search, you can filter down to the higher-quality images by selecting “large” from the list to the left. Once I found a large, good-quality image of Diego, I edited the colors to match the colors of the invitation, then put the rest of it together. I also added a dinosaur footprint I drew in PhotoShop. If you’re not comfortable designing your own invitation, Tiny Prints actually offers a Diego Dinosaur invitation, which I used for inspiration when designing mine.
Personal information is blurred out, as you can see. I printed the invites on cardstock and put them in envelopes I already had on hand. My husband was able to do all the party printing for us through his company, so the invitations were totally free!! We invited my son’s preschool class, plus a few extra friends, so all invitations were hand-delivered, saving us even the cost of postage!! Still, even with the cost of printer ink and postage, making your own invitations is a great way to save money on your party budget!!
We invited 17 kids and ended up with 14 at the party. Add to that the Owl and the Tiger, and we had a total of 16 kids!
Stay tuned for more party details in Part 2!!
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