Jungle Room Party -1yr- Hay Bale Safari Ride

Our youngest son's birthday is in December so we had to be creative with how we were going to celebrate his first birthday during the cold weather and so close to Christmas.  We decided to create a Jungle Room! 

INVITATIONS:  I picked out an invitation from our local printing company; it had a jungle border and I printed them at home so that I could word it myself.  We said, We can't believe a year has passed.  Our little monkey has grown so fast!" and we invited our guests to come to Luke's Jungle Room. 

DECORATIONS:  We turned our kids playroom into a Jungle Room.  First we made a sign that said "Luke's Jungle Room" by gluing small sticks to butcher paper. 

Next we hung large poster paper that was already jungle-printed with leaves and sticks.  We found this paper at Hobby Lobby.  Then we hung plush animals and parrots (from Oriental Trading) on fishing line that my husband strung across the room.  We also created animals for our Jungle Room.  We stenciled large animals on butcher paper (we keep this on hand to wrap up meats for the freezer). 

For the giraffe we hot-glued giraffe-printed fabric to the stenciled paper; we used gray foam sheets on the elephant and we used an old orange beach towel to create the lion.  The beach towel's shaggy hairs really made the lion come alive.  Then we just taped each animal to the jungle paper that we hung previously. 

We also made palm trees.  We cut out triangles from our diaper boxes to make the tree trunks and then cut out leaves using green fabric.  A lot of the jungle room was created using things around our house (fishing line jungle animals from the toy box butcher paper from the pantry). 

ACTIVITIES:  We created a safari ride for the kids.  We just threw some borrowed hay bails onto a trailer and pulled the trailer with our 4-wheeler.  I gave the kids a pair of binoculars (from OT) so they could find the animals in the woods (inflatables from OT).  We did the safari ride right at 4:00pm because it was somewhat cool outside on this day.  After the safari ride the kids really enjoyed playing in the Jungle Room with the other inflatable jungle animals and a kids tent that I had set up. 

FOOD:  We made a huge crock pot of chili for the guests.  And we served hotdogs puff corn and trail mix (peanuts and M&M's and candy corn). 

CAKE:  A good friend made our cake.  She made a small smash cake by creating a monkey that looked like he was sitting in the jungle grass and then she made 24 cupcakes and decorated them with brown icing to match the monkey. 

FAVORS:  I made little goody bags for each child.  Each bag included:  a bag of animal crackers a monkey note pad (from Dollar Tree) a pencil with a giraffe print (I found the whole pack of pencils on the clearance rack at Michael's) and a little plastic jungle animal.  We saved in several areas by planning ahead.  We started our animal stencils several weeks before the party and it was time-consuming but my husband and I really put our heads together to create a great jungle room for the little kids.  I also started looking at every clearance rack several weeks ahead of time to get things at a better cost (the pack of giraffe-printed pencils were 8 for $1.00 at Michael's) and I got most of my decorations from Dollar Tree. 

It was a very fun party to have in December.  All the kids loved the jungle room the tent and the animals.  It was time-consuming to create but we were able to bond as a family (my family of four) while creating the jungle room!  "