Curious George

6:44 PM Angela Haythorpe 1 Comments

For my eldest son's 1st birthday we went with a Curious George theme. I wanted an easy birthday because I was due with my second son any day. This was in early 2008, so there wasn't as many things available as there are now but this is what I did. I hope it helps!

THE INVITATION:

The Invitation was a combination of ideas. I found a free printable invitation and LOTS of cute ideas from www.pbs.org but I wanted a cute poem on the cards as well. So I made my own invitation. If you do not have more advanced computer skills (I used the program Adobe InDesign) you can easily cut out the picture of George with the cake and glue it onto another page with your poem and details to make it look exactly the way you want and then color copy it.

THE DECOR:

It was an indoor party and although, at the time, we lived in the Tropics of North East Australia it was still an unpredictable time of year with the weather. So, I tried to make it look as much like the jungle inside as possible.

I decided to paint these pictures on butcher's paper as to make a big impact. I always have one area in the party where I can take pictures with all the guests so that we can keep it as the kids' special birthday picture for that year.

If you are not artistic, you can download a picture(s) and blow it up at a print shop and hang it in the house. This is usually way cheaper than store bought banners. I drew these but I let my kids paint them as a fun activity the weekend before and after they dried, just rolled them up and saved them for the next weekend.

I used LOTS of PRIMARY COLORS. Red, Blue, Green and Yellow were the feature colors for the party.

I also made crepe paper palm trees. I hung them from our ceiling fans which was a lot of fun for my kids. The recognized them right away. Another thing you can do is cut off some smaller branches from your yard and place them around the house. .

THE FAVORS:

I had made a small coloring book by shrinking down the images I found and put 2 images per side on a A4/letter sized page. I folded it in half and stapled it making a small booklet. I gave them a few basic colored crayons (primary colors + brown, black and peach) and glued leaves around each crayon and then tied twine around the bundle. This is an easy project to do, especially if you just grab the leaves from a tree in your yard.

For our juice cups, I made cute little Monkey Cups that I found on Martha Stewart's site. They could be fun favor holders too! This would be a prefect way to hold your crayons, candies and stickers you might have for the children.

I also made the party hats with the little emblems from the table confetti page on the PBS website. I bought red and yellow cone hats for $1 per pack of 15 and just printed out a page of emblems and glues them on. I also pulled out some old jungle party hats I had from another party. It saved me a lot of money!

They also had a party hat on one of the web sites that was pretty cute too!

THE FOOD:

I had lots of familiar snacks for the kids. Some other things you could add are animal crackers or Nutter Butters. We didn't have those things in Australia and if I wanted them I would have had to have them shipped from the States, so we opted out.

I printed out fun little signs so we could pretend were eating jungle things.

Jungle Juice = Apple Juice

Live Worms = Gummy Worms

Beetle Wings = Potato Chips

Dried Ants = Craisins

Croc Teeth = Apple Slices

Snake Eyes = Grapes

I also had Banana Chips, Cheese and Crackers, Cantaloupe/Rock Melon and some Banana Candies.

I recently saw this idea on the Better Homes and Gardens web site and thought it was adorable!

THE CAKE:

I ended up having two cakes for my son. The first was for his party and then we had a cake for family time. Both were ice cream cakes where I slightly melted vanilla ice cream and mixed in some cookies and candy. I put some decorative candy (palm trees out of sour apple strips on one and licorice zebra stripes on the other) on the bottom of a round tin and put the semi-melted ice cream on top of it in a round tin. I let it refreeze and then put it on a platter with crushed Nilla Wafers around the edges to look like sand. Graham crackers will work well for this too, we just didn't have them in Australia. I had some jungle animal candles that I placed on top with more crushed cookies...

I am NOT a cake maker so this was the best I could come up with. I hope to expand those skills one day but I'm sure you can use your favorite search engine to find just what you like if you are a wonderful baker. However, living in the Tropics ice cream is always the way to go! ;)

GAMES:

There are some fun game ideas from www.familyfun.go.com. I did not have games because it was for my one year old... but its always good to have some ideas

For the one year old range, I had fisher price animals and other plastic animals out for the kids to play with and jungle like stuffed animals. I also had lots of big balls and a bubble machine going.

Jungle-like stuffed animals placed around the house is fun discovery for the kids too. For older kids, you can have a craft of making binoculars out of toilet paper rolls and have them go on a safari spotting different animals.