This is Part 2 of a series of posts about a Diego Dinosaur birthday party. To go to Part 1, click here.
For the party, we turned our home into dinosaur land. I didn’t get a good picture, but we made “Dinosaur Crossing” signs from a dinosaur crossing image printed on cardstock. We’re lucky (?) to have a lot trees in our yard and thus a lot of down branches, so The Owl and I collected branches and used them for the posts for the signs. Two signs printed on cardstock and stapled around the branch did the trick! Another totally free item for the party!
I finally did get a picture of one of the signs after it was taken out of the ground.
We stuck them along our walkway, and we also had some balloons on the mailbox and The Owl drew dinosaur footprints up the driveway and walkway. I was going to make something for the front door, but forgot, which worked out OK since the door ended up being propped open as the guests arrived. The Owl was super excited to stand in the doorway and greet his friends as they arrived!
We gave the parents the option to stay or drop-off, and about half stayed for the party. It was just right- not too many, not too few, and the parents who did stay seemed to enjoy watching the kids and chatting with each other. Since all the kids were from The Owl’s school, many of the parents already knew each other.
Our playroom is right off the entryway, so we decided to have the kids play there as everyone arrived. Prior to the party, we emptied the room of most of the toys, like all the GeoTrax that is usually housed there, and took them down to the basement. From upstairs we brought down the train table (usually in our office/upstairs playroom) and all the dinosaur toys, of which we have a lot! On the train table we put a lot of the Diego sets that The Owl got for Christmas. We have an Ikea Expedit shelf in our playroom that holds bins of train track, workbooks, puzzles and other miscellaneous toys. Instead of moving this out, we just put a green plastic tablecloth over it, added some streamers and put some of the dinosaur toys on top. This kept the kids out of it, and gave us an extra surface! I also brought in the little round table we usually have in the kitchen, and the felt playmat I made The Owl for Christmas for some added play areas. As the kids arrived, they were super excited to explore all the toys, and played together really well for about half an hour.
After some free-play, we invited the kids out to our back porch. I should take a minute to say that as I planned this party, I envisioned many outdoor activities, but with a birthday in mid-February, there was a good chance we would have to do the whole thing inside. I anxiously watched the weather for weeks, and we were so lucky to have a beautiful sunny day with a high of 76!! It was the perfect day for the party, and a week later we were back to cold, rainy, dreary weather so I say that was amazing luck!
Anyway, on the back porch we had set up our sandbox for a dinosaur dig. I had originally planned on making salt dough bones to bury, but that got scrapped as I ran out of time, so at the last minute my Mom picked up a couple bags of plastic dinosaurs (thanks, Mom!) I don’t think the kids cared- they were happy to dig.
We also added two Rubbermaid bins filled with sand to accommodate all the kids, and we also placed the boy’s water table there, or anyone who wanted to wash their dinos, or just have some fun playing in the water. The kids really loved this! A few of the boys snuck back inside to play with the toys after a few minutes, but most of the kids stayed really engaged with this activity.
For another simple decoration, I did a google image search for "dinosaur posters" and printed off a whole bunch of them on standard-size cardstock. Poster-sized would have been even better, but these worked really well for another totally free decoration! I taped up a bunch of them around our porch (you can sort of see them in the above two images) and also placed some around the house- on a shelf, on top of our mantle, etc.
Stayed tuned for more fun in Part 3!!
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