gypsymom

For thing #1’s sixth birthday party, he wanted Diego.  Sure, sure.  (I got a lot of these ideas from birthdaypartyideas.com, to give due credit)

For decorations, I drew some pictures of Diego and various jungle animals by copying out of books onto construction paper and cut them out, then taped onto the wall.  Also to make a hanging snake, just draw a spiral onto a piece of construction paper, then cut along the lines, draw eyes and a tongue at one end, and voila, you have a snake to hang from the ceiling fan.  For cool looking vines, take a paper grocery bag (if you can even find them), cut into strips, and twist the strips.  Not too bad looking, actually.  Also, green streamers look a bit like vines.  I also drew and cut out leaves to put up with the vines.

The cake turned out awesomely!  (I got it from Nick Jr ) First, make 2 8-inch round cakes, and stack them on top of each other.  Then frost with green icing (white icing + food coloring).  To make jungle trees, use pretzel rods.  Make leaves by first melting some green candy melting wafers, which I actually found at Wal-Mart.  Once melted, put in a small ziploc bag, and snip off one of the bottom corners (be careful, this stuff is really freakin’ hot!) and then pipe out some leaves onto wax paper, to look like these: .  Put them in the refrigerator.  Once they’re cooled and hardened, you can attach them and banana runt candies to the pretzel rods with more of the melted candy.  I suppose you could also use whoppers to make coconut trees, if you wanted.  I couldn’t find solid green Fruit by the Foot, so I skipped that part.  I inserted several of the trees into the cake, and added a few jungle animal crackers, and some plastic jungle animals I found at Wal-Mart, and had them hiding behind the trees.  I also put extra leaves around the base of the trees and it looked like a real jungle!  Everyone loved it!

I don’t think we ended up doing any activities or games, but here are some I had in mind.  Kids could create binoculars to scope things out (toilet paper rolls taped together).  Also, a safari hunt to search for various treasures.  If you really wanted to get creative and spend some time, you could hang a lot of vines in one room, and have the kids see how many “snakes” they could find and dispose of (or whichever animal you like, although “snakes” would blend in more with the “vines”).

Instead of plain old goody bags you could get some canvas bags from a craft store, and have kids decorate their own Rescue Packs.

This party was great!