Spirit Stallion -5yr- Lasso the Horses

For my daughter's 5th birthday, she wanted a Spirit Stallion of the Cimarron party.  Since her birthday is in March and we can't go outside, we have two parties- one for friends and one for family. 

For the invitations, I downloaded pictures from the official website and printed them off and glued them on brown paper that I had crumpled to look old.  The invites said "We're havin' a birthday party round-up for Cowgirl Sadie.  Gallop on over to our Paddock on..." and then I included the date and time for each of the parties.  

For decorations, I used two real saddles- one was on a bale of straw with a stick horse head in the front.  The other was on a saddle stand.  I made a background from blue cloth and poster board for behind this saddle by painting clouds on the cloth and tearing two sheets of poster board to look like hills and valleys and then painted it various shades of green. 

Other decorations included horseshoes and bits, bandana ribbon, red/white/blue star garlands, package of rope from Walmart's hardware section, and red and blue streamer and balloons.  This was the cheapest party I've ever decorated for!  Most of the horse stuff we either had or we borrowed from friends. My daughter has the Breyer Spirit and Rain so they were part of the centerpiece on the table.  Of course we were all decked out in our coyboy duds

When the guests arrived. For the friends party, I had them make frames from red foam and stickers I'd made with clip art from the computer and my Xyron machine.  While they were working on these, we took each guest and had them sit on the saddle infront of the background I'd made to take their picture with our digital camera. We dressed them up with my husbands cowboy hat and a bandana.  They turned out great!! 

I got the idea from this site to read the story to the kids before we started any games.  It was a good idea since some of the kids had never heard of the movie.  I referred to it as we played the games.  First we lassoed Spirit like the soldiers did- using the stick horse and saddle and a lasso my father in law made.  Next we tried to eat apples like Spirit and Rain did from the tree.  This idea came from this site and was a big hit with the kids.  I used skewers and kitchen string to suspend the apples from a shower curtain rod.  My husband and f-i-l held the rod up so the apples were at mouth level of the kids.  The object was to take bites from the apple without using you hands.  It was so funny!! 

The next game was to search for Spirit like Little Creek did. The kids had to find a little horse figurine where I'd hidden it in the room (on top of our mantle).  The last game was to jump across the gorge like Spirit and Little Creek.  I used 3 brown paper bags cut so they lay open.  All three I crumple, one I painted with blue and white tempera paint to look like water.  After it dried, I used packaging tape to tape the "water" to the backs of the "cliffs".  The Kids had a great time practicing their jumping. 

We bought paper plates and napkins from Birthday Party Express and for snacktime I served cupcakes decorated like an apple-- ice each yellow cupcake with red frosting and stick on a green spearmint gumdrop leaf and mini pretzel stick dipped in chocolate to look like a stem.  Then take a spoon and cut out a "bite" from each one.  Stick 1/2 of a gummy worm in each hole. The kids thought these were fun.  We also served ice cream sandwiches and juice boxes too. 

For the adults we had "grown up snacks".  At the family party we served a full dinner and then had a birthday cake decorated by a local bakery. It had Spirit and Rain figures with a little stand-up backdrop and trees on top.  In the gift bags we put a big horse figures and cowboy six-shooters we found at the dollar store as well as a real bandana, Spirit sticker (from Bday Party Express) and lots of candy. 

The thank you notes were made the same way as the invitations and included each guest's picture we'd taken. A week later my daughter's friends were still talking about our party and how much fun they had.  Definitly a big success.