Horsy Party -2yr- Haystack Potatoes

My son loves horses, so for his 2nd birthday we had a horsy party. 

I printed invitations. On the front was a cowboy with  "yeeehaaawww it's Reilly's 2nd birthday" On the inside, I had a lasso, handkerchief, saddle and "I Love Horses" and then all of the pertinent party info.  These invitations matched the plates and cups that I bought at the local party store. 

I decorated the table with a vinyl horse tablecloth and for the centerpiece I put a  red wooden toy  barn in the middle of the table with all sorts of horses surrounding it or inside it.  I bought some handkerchiefs with horses and cowboys on them from the craft store and tied them on the back of each chair (in a triangle shape, like you would wear around your neck).

Each chair had a balloon with a piece of tissue paper around it looking like a handkerchief with a face drawn on the balloon.  Each child received a cowboy hat when they came in (I purchased these by the dozen from Oriental Trading). 

Then we did a craft.  I cut out a barn out of red construction paper and one out of white copy paper (this is for the background).  I cut out a door and two windows out of the red paper and left flaps for the window and the door and pasted the red barn onto the white paper.

So when the kids arrived they were to put horses and hay stickers in the flaps (we also had chicken stickers to put in the windows up above because my son said "mom you can't put horses upstairs in a barn, you need chickens" ). We decorated the barn with white cotton balls on the outside to frame the roof. So this was their peek-a-boo farm. 

For the games, we formed two lines and each team had a stick horse.  They galloped in the grass and around a hay bail and back to the line.  This was easy for 2 year olds to do.  The next game was pin the tail on the horse.  I blew up a horse picture to about 2 feet by 3 feet and taped it to the wall.  I made tails out of brown and tan yarn and put a sticker around the top with each child's name.  This made it easy to figure out whose tail was whose. 

For lunch I made cookie cut out horse peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Then I had haystacks (shoestring potatoes) next to them on the kids plates. It resembled a horse eating hay.  I made the prancing pony cake (from birthdayexpress.com) all of the kids loved it. 

For the treat bags, I used a brown paper lunch bag and using a horse stamp, stamped a horse using brown paint. Then I used glitter for the tail and the mane to sparkle it up.  I used puffy paint for each child's name on the top of the sack.  Inside, I put a couple of plastic vinyl horses (oriental trading) , a  horse hand puppet (oriental trading) and I made crayons in the shape of a horse, barn and haystacks.  This was easy to do.  I used all of the broken brown, red and yellow crayons that we had, melted them in the microwave and poured them in candy molds.  I put them in a plastic ziplog bag with a sticker on them saying "CRAYONS", just in case they looked like chocolate to the kids.  I printed a couple of different horse pictures and made a small coloring book and had those in their too.  Everyone took home their party bags, cowboy hats and bandanas and one balloon. 

We were able to take a group picture with all of the above and it turned out cute.  My son turned two and absolutely loved the party, all of the kids did.