It's always hard to believe when another year rolls around and your little baby is that much further from when he/she was actually a little baby. :( While I do miss the cute little bundle I do love seeing them grow and change... and Jackson has definitely done that!!
We started out a few months prior to his birthday with him wanting an Avengers birthday party. And I thought I was going to be off the hook this year with an easy Jump Zone (inflatable jump things) party. But about 6 weeks before (just about the time I'm thinking about invitations) he decides that he wants an animal party... reptile/amphibian actually. I recalled someone having animals come to their party and after doing a quick search, I found
Extreme Animals. Jackson picked out which animals he wanted and I emailed them. They were available and we were booked... simple as that!
So I started working on the invites and worked up these on my silhouette machine...
Then I started thinking about favors. I'd seen something on pinterest where someone had taken a jar with a lid, glued a plastic animal to the top & spray painted it all (lid & animal) & used it for storing things. I thought that was a pretty neat idea so I wanted to do that for the container. Then came collecting jars. We had quite a bit just from saving for a few weeks and my sister, Jennifer, saved some for me to so I was set. I saw another post on pinterest where someone put chocolate rocks in a bag with a gummy animal for a favor. So I thought it would be even cooler to put that in these jars and use a gummy frog or lizard. I ended up finding frogs and so this is what we ended up with after it was all put together.
Favors for the adults-
the favor label-
For decorations I mostly just used Jackson's toy animals... a frog here a snake there. I cute out a few leaves and lizards using my silhouette and strung them up. I had some confetti like frogs and lizards that I put on the food table. I made a terrarium with a jar, rocks, fake leaves and a rubber frog. I made a few paper snakes and hung them from the chandeliers like they were uncoiling from the lights. I think that was about the extent of my decorating. My sister, Jennifer, had already made a bunting for Jackson as part of his birthday present so I got that early and hung it up as well.
Oh and I can't forget the wall with the pictures... I really like doing this for each birthday (even last year when Bella had her birthday at Great Wolf Lodge, I still put up her yearly pictures for the month for us to look at). It's so fun to see how much they change year after year in each picture.
As for the party itself, I wasn't going to have to do too much thankfully. No games to put together or anything like that. I figured we eat snacky foods, sing happy birthday, eat cake and do presents. Then the animals would come and that would take up the remaining hour. Well Isabella had other ideas. She was dead set on us doing a piñata. Jackson was pretty pumped about the idea too. But I told them that I wasn't going to do a piñata along with all the other costs associated with this party (the animals being the big expense). So Isabella figured out how much she would need to save to buy one for her brother and then buy the things to stuff it with and then told her brother that she would buy him one. A very sweet gesture (although partly she just wanted because she enjoys them so much). In the end, she did save the money and buy it and the toys to stuff it with and I offered to go ahead and get the candy because I wanted to have healthier candies which would cost too much for her so save. So I'm very proud of Isabella's generosity in saving weeks of her allowance to get a piñata for her brother's party. :) It was a pretty tough piñata... after everyone had swung at it a couple times, we had to call on my 17 year old nephew to bust the thing open.
My mom made a yummy snake cupcake(s)...
Jackson got lots of really cool and fun presents!
And the grand finale was the animals. It was a really warm day in our non-shaded backyard but the kids didn't seem to mind that much. Everyone (even the parents) got to hold nearly all the animals and touch/pet every single one. The handler was very good at providing lots of information and having patience with a group of small kids. Jackson was so in love with all the animals... even going so far as to give one of the lizards kisses. He was just so enthralled and would say, "he is so cute!"
The animals that came were a snake, a tree frog (from Australia, not the red eye tree frog variety from C. America that Jackson loves... but he didn't notice the difference!), a coatimundi (we first learned of these animals when we went to Costa Rica last year), a fennec fox (Jackson has a storybook with a fennec fox in it and they are the cutest little things with huge ears), a lizard (actually they brought 3 lizards because they weren't sure which we wanted... so there was a bearded dragon, a leopard gecko, and another... I can't remember what it was!), and a cayman.
And I think nearly everyone got in on the snake action. This is Banana... and he feels mighty weird slithering around while you're holding him!
So that puts another successful birthday party in the books! :)
