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Bug Party 4yr - Bug Poem Invitation

February 2002

Sheri in Crystal Lake, Il  USA

Special Mention

IT’S A BUG THEME! For my son's 4th birthday we chose a bug theme.  His birthday is in September so we just spent a entire summer of him bringing us bugs so we felt this was appropriate.

First thing we did was print out a poem on the computer and ran copies.  The poem read, Butterflies and Beatles slugs and worms, Nets and canisters and everything that squirms. Every rock unturned next to a pile of dirt, Huge holes in the garden gross stains on my shirt. Yes it's me Jacob that would be my name, Bugs are my life And catching them is the game. So come to my party Cause soon I'll be 4 It will be so much fun, The earth is ours to explore.  We then included all the party information and got ready to decorate!

This was a great party to do because Jacob's birthday is at the end of September so all the Halloween decorations are out and you can find lots of plastic bugs and stuff. We basically just went to the party store and went crazy buying plastic bugs.  We tacked up plastic beatles, ants, bees, cockroaches you name it, we had it on our wall, our windows, our cabinets, toilets, ANYWHERE!  I was able to tack it into the wall on our basement without causing any damage to the walls but we used that putty (it feels like gum) to do the rest of the walls.  It comes right off.  You can get it at any craft store.  It is what a lot of schools use for post it notes instead of tape or tacks. We also had a spider web (again another Halloween decoration) where all the spiders nested. We purchased a couple fake rats and mice and placed them through the house.  This was great to startle the adults as well. This was a relative party so we had adults and children from just about any age.

For the meal, we did your basic salads and meat, but I placed some bugs just on the top (only for presentation purposes) to gross people out.  I was able to remove them before we served everyone up but they got to see the cockroaches placed on their taco salad before they ate. This was (without needing to mention) not a favorite with the adults but the kids got a kick out of it. I then had previously purchased simple white plastic plates, cups and forks.  I used a glue gun and on low heat I glued little plastic ants running along the rim of the plates, around the cups and up the forks.  They were so melted in the plastic that I did not need to worry about one getting lost in the food.

I then had the kids do a pinata.  I was able to find a big black spider pinata due to Halloween being right around the corner.  The kids collected the candy in the canisters I made them. For the canisters, I simply had been saving the empty baby formula canisters from my newborn.  I had collected them all (they are cardboard with a plastic lid) and I used contact paper to decorate them all.  I just wrapped white contact paper around all of them and then with black permanent markers I wrote "JACOB'S BUG JAR" "DANIELLE'S BUG JAR", etc.  And then at the local craft store I purchased some scrapbook stickers with the bug theme and stuck them all over the jar.  I then bought clear contact paper to go around the newly decorated jars to laminate the stickers in place.  I then poked holes in the tops of the jars and 2 years later  my kids are still using those jars to keep their lightning bugs or whatever they catch in them.

During a relaxing time of the party, the kids anxiously went outside to play and we found most of the kids turning our landscaping rocks to find bugs to put into the new bug jars they had just received.  They really liked this!

After the pinata we served cake.  This was the easy one. I just made 2 chocolate sheet cakes and layered them with ice-cream in the middle, decorated it with dark chocolate icing and then I bought a package of Oreo Cookie Crumbs (you can find it by the pie crusts in the grocery store) and I put that in a blender with an assortment of different types of chocolate cookies some fudge cookies and some chocolate graham crackers and chopped it all and mixed it together.  Then I sprinkled it all over the cake and made it look like an ant mound. I then just had plastic ants all over the cake to give it the effect of an ant hill. This was a big hit for the kids.  They all wanted a bug after we sang happy birthday.

It was a relatively simple birthday and I let all the kids help me take the bugs off the wall when we were done and they were all happy to be able to take home a handful of plastic bugs at the end.

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