Triceratopsilicious Good Time!

For Ollie's 2nd birthday, I planned to do a dinosaur party. I think I decided that the day after his first birthday party. Being that I am sort-of homeless and living with my inlaws, I decided that the best thing to do was rent a shelter at a park. The park we went to was wonderful. It had a duck pond, a baseball field, and two playgrounds. The day was beautiful.

For decorations, I brought a couple dinosaur puppets I had borrowed from the library, and a few of Ollie's toy dinosaurs. I bought a dinosaur tablecloth, and napkins and did plain colored green and orange plates. Nana brought balloons and matching party hats.

His menu was as follows: Meaty Megalosaurus Munchers (ham, turkey and roast beef sandwiches), Sauropelta Sweets (strawberries, blueberries, grapes and mandarin oranges), Corythosaurus Crunchers (chips), Volcanodon Veggies (fresh cut up bell peppers, broccoli, cucumbers and baby carrots) and a 3-dimensional Triceratops cake.

Ollie helping me make the cake

My sister and her girls came over and helped with the food. Jade became my master sculpter and I the cake froster. I'm pretty impressed with how it turned out. I baked two boxes of white cake mix in two loaf pans and one longaberger mixing bowl. In retrospect, I think I should have done three mixes because there would have been less cutting. We using one loaf and then another have (sliced the long way) and stacked for the body. Then, the bowl piece was cut in half from top to bottom and one piece was the back of the head. The other half was cut to be the tail and the snout. Legs were cut out of the other half of the loaf pan.

Master Artist

The froster!

Overall, I'm excited about how it looks. The horns are ice cream cones, the frill is half a paper plate and the eyes were done with white frosting and blue M&Ms. I saw this cake online and we used just different cake pans to complete it. Ollie thought it was super cool!

Ollie in his dino shirt with his cake!

I planned three activities, although we only did two. I had the kids make fossils by pressing little dinosaurs into air bake clay. They all seemed to enjoy it. The second activity was to do a dinosaur dig. I had planned to hide little dinosaurs in the sandbox and let the kids hunt for them but it never happened. Oh well! I also brought bread for the kids to feed the ducks. This of course was a huge hit and I should have brought about 10 loaves of bread!

For goodies, the kids each got a sucker, dinosaur notepad and a pencil. Instead of the bags, I simply tied them up with orange curling ribbon.

All-in-all, I think everyone had a good time. Ollie loved the party and seeing all his family together. He received many great gifts and lots of awesome hugs!