Farm Party -3yr-  Live Chicks as Favors

This time I'm sharing with you the first birthday's celebration of our son Gabriel Jose. For the past two years I've shared with you our daughter's first and second birthday and won special mentions for the ideas. Daddy is an equine veterinarian and grandpa has a farm with stallions, mares, foals, sheep, bunnies,etc. so you can imagine how our kids love animals, especially horses. So it was no difficult to choose a theme for Gaby's first birthday: the farm.

For the invitations we took a digital picture of Gabriel on one of Grandpa's mare and glue it on sack fabric. We invited each guest to grandpa's farm and ask them to put on their cowboy boots to celebrate with us. Everyone loved them! As each kid arrived, they received cowboy hats (for boys) and farmer strawhats (for girls).  They all were taken to a petting farm were they could have a close encounter with chicks, hens, roosters, bunnies, etc.They all had a blast!

For the babies (we have few kids under 1 in our family) we had an "infant's corner" where we put stuffed farm animals, farm animals books, a rocking horse, bouncers, and also had a TV with a "baby animals from the farm" video that we didn't have time to watch !!! Our first activity was to sing a farm song in spanish in which every kid was wearing a farm animal mask (from Oriental trading) and they had to dance and make the animal sound. It was so funny!!! Then we played " pass the chick around" using a stuffed musical chicken. 

I love hand's on projects, so my cousin, Amy taught the kids how to prepare home made playdough. They used cooking ingredients like flour, vegetable oil, food coloring and salt to make their own dough. It was amazing to see every kid pouring the ingredients, taking turns to help stirring the dough and watching the colors... Then they got time to play using cookie cutters and at the end of the workshop they were able to take their playdough home in ziplocs.

We were ready to eat so we had lots of puertorrican dishes like "albondigas", alitas de pollo, polvorones, and pizza for everyone!! Then we had uncle Rafa and daddy to help the kids taking turns to ride a mare.  Many kids (and some parents too!) were excited to take their first ride on a horse. I took a digital picture of every kid on the horse and sent it as a thank you note few days after the birthday party.  Time to sing Cumpleanos feliz!!!!

Everyone surrounded the cake, an art piece created by auntie Thelma, who created a farm using sugar of different colors to give it the barn, hay and grass look.  She used a precious moments farm and candies to decorate it.  We gave every kid a mini pinata (instead of having a big one) with goodies inside. They also got a chocolate bar with a home made cover that included Gabriel's picture and "nutritive" information like: day of birth, time, place, height, weight. It also included the names of the manufacturers: Mom and dad!! and the supervisor: big sister Anais Sofia!!! Everyone loved it!

When the parents thought that it was all over, they had to go with their kids and adopt one, two, may be three or four colored chickens that we had for them. We prepared small ziplocs with purina (food) enough for at least one week and paper bags to carry the chicks.  We are still receiving calls giving thanks for the fantastic time everyone had.  Our son had a great time, he played, dance, ate, got dirty, rode a horse and received lots of presents. And everyone had a great country day, enjoying one of nature's most valuable treasures: baby animals from the farm!