Fire Theme -4yr- Firestation Tour

For my son’s 4th birthday we decided on a fire-themed party.  He loves trucks of all types especially Firetrucks.  I had been planning this party for almost a year so I had lots of ideas.  For the invitations I bought cardstock from the hobby store with a fireman and Dalmatian on it.  I printed out the information in a cute curly font. 

The invitation said  Sound the Alarms, Preston is turning 4.  I printed each child’s name on the front envelope using a Dalmatian font in black/white.  We closed the envelope up with fire-themed stickers and added some to the front too.   

The party begins-  The first part of the party was a scheduled tour at our nearest Firestation.  All the kids and parents met there for the tour.  The kids had a blast as the Fireman showed them where they eat, sleep and all the awesome trucks.  They got to get inside and check them out.  The best part of the tour was when they brought out Sparky the Dalmatian.  The kids really enjoyed petting him.   

Next, the kids all came to our house for the rest of the party. I made a large welcome sign using a fire-themed poster from the Teacher Supply store. I used red scrapbooking stickers to write Welcome to Preston’s 4th Birthday Party and hung it in the kitchen near all the other table decorations. I purchased the Fire 911 partyware for a local store and decorated the kitchen table with a red table cloth and yellow and orange forks and cups.   

As far as activities during the party, I rented a Dalmatian Jump House.  I also had my children’s game room set up with several craft activities for the kids to do.  One paper activity was a toilet paper roll Dalmatian dog they had to color and glue together from DLT-kids.   I had also printed out stacks of fire-themed color book pages from the Internet.   We had close to 30 kids, so this allowed some kids to play inside while others were outside in the jump house.    

The cake was a 3-D fire truck I made complete with axle and wheels.  I used the Wilton long loaf pan and sculpted the front to the shape I needed.  The cake was set on a cake board cut to fit then I added some hidden pillars glued to the bottom of the board to serve as axles.  Then I just added Oreo cookies to cover the axle.  I iced the cookies in black to look more like tires.  I cut out a square section of cake to serve as an inset front windshield on the truck and added faces I made of molded fondant that resembled my two children. 

Preston, the birthday boy, was in the drivers seat of course.  I then added a fondant license plate to the cake reading  Cool 1 on the front and PCG-4 on the back which is my sons initials and age.  On the back section of the fire truck on both sides, I added molded chocolate ladders painted silver with Luster Dust.  I had also included a section of rolled up firehouse (fondant) which I put on the top back section of the truck.  For the finishing touch, I added a Dalmatian dog candle to the top of the truck and some fire hydrant candles around the cake board. 

The cake was a huge hit and was so fun to make.   For the kids goody bags, I ordered white metal pails from Oriental Trading.  Those turned out to be too small to hold all the stuff so instead I used red plastic fireman hats (US TOYS) to hold the kids goodies. I gathered everything up in red and yellow cellophane paper and tied up with curling ribbon then put it inside the fire hat.  As for the small pails, we used those to hold candy from the fire truck piñata.  They were the perfect size so each child got the same amount of candy. 

To keep the kids from mixing up their pails, I printed colored nametags with a Dalmatian dog on my color printer. Next I cut them to size and ran each one thru my sticker maker now I had perfect sized stickers for the pails. 

Inside the goody bags I included 101 Dalmation paperback books, diecast Hotwheels firetrucks, hand-molded chocolate (red) fire hydrant suckers, dog bone shaped cookies iced in royal icing with white background and black Dalmatian spots (homemade), fire hydrant squirt pencil toppers, small fireman squirters (US Toys), fire themed stickers, red hot candies, Dalmatian slap bracelets (US Toys), small fireman toys with other fire accessories (Big Lots) and lots of other goodies.   

All in all the party was a huge success and everyone left happy.  As a thank you for the firemen who put on the tour, I took a cake to them a few weeks later.  My son really enjoyed his party and says now that he wants another fireman party next year.  :-)