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We'd love to hear about your fabulous and creative parties! We're looking for people who want to share the details about parties they've hosted here in the Phoenix metro area.

We want to see your creative ideas. We want to learn about great vendors and resources in the Valley. We want read about your helpful hints.

• Party type and theme - what was your inspiration?
• Party location
• Invitations - do you make them, order them, or use evite?
• Decorations
• Games and Activties
• Food - what was your menu? did you make the food yourself? any special recipes you'd like to share with us?
• Cake - was there a cake or cupcakes? Did you make it or order it?
• Party Favors
  

Please include your name, part of town you reside in and something about you that you want to share (how long you've lived here, something about your family, or do you own a local business?). We'd love to see photos of your party especially all the fabulous details. Please also include the name of vendors you used (local or web) and any postive reviews you would like to share.

*By submitting photos to us, you are agreeing that the photos are your property. Please make sure that the people in the photo have given you permission for their photo to be posted online. When you submit your party and photos you are giving Desert Parties permission to post your description as a whole or parts as decided by Desert Parties.

*This blog is owned by Dana Brown, Simply Sweets. Real Parties featured on this blog, are not exclusively Simply Sweets customers. We welcome parties where the cake is home made of purchased from another bakery.

*Desert Parties reserves the right to choose not to feature a submitted party. Desert Parties is a family friendly blog.

To submit your party, send us an email with the header "Real Party"

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.