Noah's Ark Party 1 yr

For my son's first birthday my husband and I decided to go with a Noah's ark theme. We were very excited to get started on the planning, and then found out there is very little Noah's ark decor out there, and it all looks the same. So we ended up making a lot of it ourselves. INVITATIONS: For the invitations we began with a medium blue cardstock paper, and cut it into three long strips, each being the base for our invite. Then we took a dark gray cardstock and cut out three strips to overlap each other coming down to about halfway on the blue invite. At the bottom of each gray strip we cut swags, or a wavy pattern. This gave the impression of storm clouds. Then we did the same thing with a dark blue cardstock only upside down and at the bottom of the card, which were the 'waves' of water. In the middle of the waves we placed a brown ark which was cut out of dark brown cardstock. I added a small distant dove in the sky with a white colored pencil. This was all the front of the invite. On the back we glued on white paper that had the party info printed on it from the computer. Giving the date, time, place, etc. with small rainbows placed in between each paragraph. DECORATIONS: We decided on a dark blue and brown color scheme to go with our decor. We used these colors in crepe paper to hang up around the party rooms. We also had balloons in these colors tied to the birthday boy's highchair for when he had his 'smash cake'. We used his Little People's Noah's Ark toy as added decor, and had a large version of the invitation hanging in the middle of the room. It was exactly like the invites only on a a large piece of foam board. That was pretty much it for decor, except for the food table. We went simple. ACTIVITIES: Since this was our son's first b.day the only other child there was his older toddler brother, all other guests were adults. So other than the Little People's ark for the boys to play with and Noah's ark coloring pages which I printed off the internet we didn't have children games. Instead my husband created a birthday boy version of the game Oodles. Oodles is made up of cards which have an opening easy question, and then 8-10 other questions whose answers all begin with the same letter. The question's go to one person, until they can't answer then it's opened up to all the players. Whoever answers the last question correctly wins the card, the person with the most cards wins the game. My husband copied the exact format of the Oodles cards and made our own cards that had both animal questions (for Noah's ark) and questions about the birthday boy on them. All together the cards theme letters spelled our sons name, which was just an extra my husband did for fun. It was a fun time, all the guests had fun answering and guessing at the questions. This is a great idea for anyone to do, is take a regular party board game and alter it to fit your theme. The winner of our game won a prize, which was a Noah's Ark picture frame. PARTY SNACKS: We used a blue table cloth, brown plates, cups, forks, etc. All the food was 'animal' food. I had fresh fruit and vegetables set out. Along with that we had animals crackers. CAKE: For the cake I did a cake and sugar cookies. I made a Noah's ark cake. To do this I baked a chocolate sheet cake, cut it lengthwise in half and then using chocolate frosting frosted the top of one half and placed the other half on that. Once it was double layered I took a long serrated knife and carefully cut a wedge off each short side (it is a rectangle shape) to give it an ark/boat shape. Then I frosted the entire cake with the chocolate icing until covered and smooth. I then took chocolate covered orange jelly candies (which are log shaped) and placed them around the top edge of the cake for the ark's 'railing'. (Other ideas to use for this are chocolate graham logs, prezel rods). I then used chocolate graham crackers, and glued them together with chocolate frosting to shape a four walled square, topping it with two more crackers that were slanted against each other to shape a little 'house' (same ideas as a gingerbread house). I then placed this 'house' on top of the ark cake right in the very middle. I have to say, it had a pretty darn good likeness to an ark! The last thing I did was add a chocolate graham cracker square to the front side of the cake and piped frosting around it and this was the ark's door. Aside from the ark cake I also make sugar cookies in shape of animals. I found some Martha Stewart animals cookie cutters at macy's. Once the cookies were baked I made a glossy sugar cookie icing, using different bright colors, and iced each animal a different color. They turned out very pretty and added a lot of color to the food table. I would suggest making the cookies a day or two ahead of time, just for your own sanity. For drinks we just had regular sodas and tea. EXTRAS:We had a large white picture matte frame that we had all the guest write birthday wishes on for our son. Which we will use to frame his photo in. It was a great and fun party for our son, who soaked up the attention. We ate, played the game, opened presents and watched our son dig into his first chocolate cake! The whole party lasted about two hours, which was perfect for our sons age. THANK YOUS: In each thank you card we included a wallet size photo of our son covered in chocolate cake from the party, everyone adored it!