Real Parties: Dinosaur Themed 3rd Birthday

Dana Brown is the owner of Simply Sweets and the Desert Parties Blog. She resides in Phoenix, AZ with her husband and 3 year old son.

This past January we hosted a dinosaur themed party for my son's 3rd birthday party. Everyone had a blast and he's already planning his next birthday party - he's already been talking about a monster shaped cake.

I made the invitations using Photoshop and a dinosaur digital scrapbooking kit (by Michelle Swadling, Gotta Pixel). The invitations were 4 x 6 inches and I had them printed as photos at Costco.

My son has many dinosaurs that we used to decorate our house for the party. We found the large T-rex at Toys R Us - my son's room is also decorated in a dinosaur theme so many of the decorations we were able to use in his room once the party was over. I cut out dinosaur footprints from green cardstock and taped them to the sidewalk and entrance to our house. On our front door I posted a dinosaur crossing sign that I made in Photoshop using the digital scrapbook kit that I also used for his invitations - his favorite dinosaur is triceratops I tried to use this species as much as possible. I also picked up a dinosaur Happy Birthday banner from Dollar Tree.

Because the guests ranged from ages 2 to 6 we didn't have many planned activities and mostly let them run around and play in the backyard and in our large sand box. We rented a dinosaur jump house from Mr B's Moonwalk (excellent customer service from this company - I highly reccomend them!) - this was a huge hit and the kids spent much of their time jumping away - I'm sure all the kids napped well that day! We also had a Triceratops pinata (Target) which I filled with candy, play-do (that I picked up during the after Halloween sales), and stickers. I bought blue colored lunch bags from Target (much cheaper than the party bags from the party store), wrote the kids names on the bags ahead of time and added some stickers from Dollar Tree. Helpful hint - have a bowl with extras for the kids who didn't get much in their goody bags once the pinata broke.

We served pizza for lunch - one of my son's favorite foods. And what's a party without cake? Simply Sweets, of course. I made a dinosaur volcano cake because my son has always been interested in volcanos. The volcano part of the cake is double chocolate sourcream with chocolate buttercream icing. The base of the cake is white sourcream, strawberry mousse filling and American buttercream icing. The dinosaurs are plastic figurines. I found dinosaur napkins from the Dollar Tree and I bought plain blue and green plates. The noise makers were also from the Dollar Tree - they didn't work too well but that was fine as we didn't need all the kids making a lot of noise. I rented the kids chairs from Party People and used our adjustable folding table (love that table - it adjusts to 3 different heights).

All of the kids got dinosaur tattoos which I picked up at Oriental Trading Company and Party City. The explorer hats were also from Oriental Trading Company. We also gave out plastic eggs filled with small dinosaurs that I gots from Oriental Trading Company and Michaels, dinosaur rings were from ABC Cake Decorating, and Simply Sweets chocolate dinosaur suckers.