12547

Animal Adventure Bash -2yr- Animal Grilled Cheese

December 2005

Pavithra in Billerica, MA

Honorable Mention

Animal Adventure Bash - 2 yr.   For my son Gautham's 2nd birthday the choice of an animal theme was an obvious one, as he loved animals. I am thankful to this site as I got a lot of ideas from here and molded them to suit our needs. Since his birthday is in June we had planned on an outdoor party in our backyard. The party was scheduled for early evening (4 - 6 p.m.). We had invited 8 children (ranging from 1 yr. to 4 yr. of age) and their parents. 

For the invitation I used evite (web based invite) as all my friends have email and all of the children invited use the computer to play games. Also, it is the fastest way of communication nowadays. In the invitation, I had an animated image of a party monkey. The invite said, It's time to answer the Call of the Wild, And bring out the party animal in every child. It's sure to be a zoo, As Gautham's turning two!! Swing by.....        

For the decorations, I had some blow up animals that came with an animal pool I had bought a year ago. So we scattered them around our backyard. Also just that morning we completed our installing a swingset, our gift to our son for his second birthday. So my husband decorated that with a lot of felt animal stickers.

For the tablecloths, I had bought regular white tablecloths and used a zebra stamp and a leopard stamp and made a border with the respective prints. The plates and bowls were the Zoo Pals that sell at Walmart. Each plate and bowl has an animal face and the 2 small compartments look like it's ears. I had also got Zoo Pals cutlery for the kids to use. They are definitely the cheapest and the cutest ones on the market. 

As soon as the children came in they each got a party hat in either blue, pink or yellow that they got to decorate with felt animals. I had got a huge tub of felt animals from Michaels. This kept them occupied until all the children arrived. The kids also took turns to play with the blown up animals used for decoration as they also doubled as some fun games for the kids to play  Ring the Giraffe (the giraffe came with three blow up rings with which you had to ring it's horns) and Feed the Tiger (the tiger had his mouth open real wide. He came with six balls, which you had to use to feed him, kind of like a beanbag toss). Then we had an egg hunt. I had picked up some baskets and eggs on clearance right after Easter. Half of the eggs were filled with chenille chicks and the other half were filled with candy. All the kids loved the egg hunt.        

We are vegetarian, so all the food served had no meat in them.  For food, I had made animal grilled cheese sandwiches for the cookies. I had used metal cookie cutters to do the same. The children were also served animal crackers, goldfish and boxed drinks. For the adults I had chips and a layered dip, mini calzones, dhokla and grilled pav (the last two dishes are Indian. I felt that I had to include a few Indian dishes, as we are Indian. Also we had other Indians and Americans who love Indian food attending).

I had made an animal adventure cake for my son. The base was a 9 by 13 cake. Half of it was a vanilla chocolate chip cake and the other half was vanilla with sprinkles. I had frosted this cake in a tan color. It had grass here and there and chocolate trees. On one corner of this cake I placed a 2 layer 7 oval vanilla cake. From this oval cake flowed a waterfall. All over I had placed an assortment of animals I had made out of rolled buttercream  crocodile, lion and lion cub, zebra, hippo, turtle, monkey and giraffe. Children got to pick an animal with their piece of cake. The cake was a huge hit and it was fun to see my son identify all the animals. 

I believe in a couple of useful return gifts over a bag full of trinkets that the kids will throw out in a couple of days. So I had picked up some of Roseart Super Artset at a discount from Target. They were n a sale and I paid only $4 per set. Each contained paints, markers, color pencils and crayon. For the older kids I bought Roseart Craft Sets. It was the same price but they had felt cutouts, googly eyes, glitter and lots of fun stuff to make fun crafts. To tie all this in with the theme of animals I covered them with white tissue paper that I had stamped using the same animal pints I had used for the tablecloths. I had also added a little paper bag that was also stamped that had a wooden bird whistle and some candy for the children. They also got to take home their basket full of eggs from the egg hunt.        

All the children and adults enjoyed the party very much. Most important of all my son had a great time.

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