Construction Party -2yr- Polaroid in a Frame Gift

Cars, trucks, airplanes, trains, that's what my son loves at age 2, that made it easy to select a birthday party theme.

For invitations, party fqavors and party decorations I purchased the Construction "Ultimate party pack" from Birthday Express, I also combined it with some other items from the "transportation" theme from party city and plastic construcion helmets from the Bob the builder (which my son also loves!).

For DECORATION: At the entrance of the house we had a "Party's here" mobile, a balloons bouquet and a "construction site" sign indicating the name of the project (my son's B-day", owner- my son's name, builder (my husband and I), etc just as on a real project. Inside, I set up the dinning table using the materials from the party pack, contruction cones, some of the napkins, blowouts, curled ribbon all over, and some of the "cement candy trucks" that came with the package.

I used the construction tape to put on the back of all the chairs of the dinning room. The cake was a round cake laminated with sugar, then on top of the sugar laminate we had the truck from the b-day theme made with frosting. Around the cake we had a construction site made out of colored coconut flakes and small trucks and our son's name made out of sugar laminate. We had a "stop" sign by the hall that leads to the bedrooms of the house. We had a "yield" sign by the food area. We made a big "Drive Thru" sign by the food serving area. We had a "Cake Avenue" sign directing people to the dinning room, a "Games Park" sign for the playing area, etc. We played kids music all the time.

We played a lot of games with the kids and we gave them prizes on each game. I won't go into the details of the games played but here's how we organized it: Using cardstock we made a sign for each game, we posted the signs on a wall with a "Today's Activities" title on top of the list, about 15 signs or more in different colors, the last one was to watch a movie. We knew that posting the games was going to force us to follow an agenda and the kids were going to ask for the "next activity", which is exactly how it happened (we planned more than we though we needed, but to our surprise, the kids were so involved that they palyed almost all of them).

We had a music selection for each game, we also had designated game coordinators (my sister, niece & sister in law). There are lots of sites on the internet with games ideas. We welcomed each kid with a plastic construction helmet and asked them to go to the helmet decoration area. The kids had a variety of foam letters and foam stickers to personalized their helmet.

Then we took a picture of each child with their helmet. The background of the picture was the tablecover of the "transportation" party theme, (it is a blue cover with roads, all kinds of vehicles and signs), we hanged it on a wall put a balloons bouquette on front of it where the kids stand to have their picture taken. We gave them a foam picture frame with their picture. The pictures were printed before they left the party (thanks to digital images!).

We played a lot of games so really it will be too much to list them here, but just to give you an idea, we had indoor and outdoor games, outside we had a bubbles tournamet and all kinds of patio toys that kept the little ones busy.

For the not so little we had a dance contest, we also had a "fill the bag with ballons contest" for this one the parents had to wear a big trash bag as pants on one side and their kids had a bag filled with ballons on the oposite side, one kid had to hold the bag, another had to get the balloon, one at a time, from the bag and run to fill their parents bag, at the end of the music the kids of the parent with the most ballons won a prize.

We had a "paint at the rhythm" of the music contest and used a song that went from very fast to very slow, it was fun. The little ones such as my son participated in some games by being "held" by an older cousin, he had a lot of fun.

We had small cement candy trucks as well as favor boxes filled with small toys, a bag of cookies and a small tin of M&M for all the kids to take home, they also took home all kids of small toys (party favors), the decorated helmet and the picture on a frame. We used our son's trucks as part of the party decorations, one was filled with Hershey's chocolate bars with I relabed with the name "Terrible Two's, very sweet and a lot of fun", net weight was my son's actual weight in ounces.

On the back of the bar we had three small sections, first we had the serving size "one fanstastic 2 Yr old and nutritional facts (I made up a few), then we had his name and a thank you note and at the end a picture of him. Another truck was filled with chocolate covered marshmellows (each individually wrapped). We had mac&cheese and popcorn chicken for the kids as a main meal.