With two vacations in July and August, I knew I had to have Little Mister's fourth birthday party planned way ahead of time. I went through several ideas and pinned several things on Pinterest. Phineas and Ferb theme? Nah. Not DIY enough. Hungry Caterpillar? Little Mister didn't like that idea. LEGO theme? I've got many more years left to do a LEGO party. Trucks? Yeah, trucks! With road signs and cupcakes falling out of a dump truck! Little Mister agreed to it right away. And yes, he had a Cars theme last year. The boy has a passion. We go with it.
(For simplicity, I'll put all the inspiration links at the bottom.)
I had grand ideas for this construction paper road. We're always left with black and brown after we get a rainbow pack of construction paper. It's convenient at Halloween time, but we've had stacks just sitting on the craft shelf for months. So I thought, Hey! I'll use all that black construction paper to make a road winding through the living room! But then I had to tape down every free edge, so the cars and little feet wouldn't rip the road. It ended up a little more tapey than I would have liked. If I were to do it over, and didn't have a ton of construction paper to use, I would use black contact paper for a cleaner look.
Yes, we cleaned the trucks first.
We had brownie cupcakes with no frosting, so they'd stay neat in the truck setup.
But that felt a little boring.
So I whipped some cream and let Little Mister choose some candy
from the bulk section at the grocery store.
He thought that was super fun.
All the party guests were four and five,
so I kept the planned activities to a minimum.
We did one treasure hunt outside as part of our toy car exchange,
but the rest of the time they just played.
That's all the little ones really want to do at parties anyway, in my experience.
A friend—the mom of one of our party guests—graciously
brought over some tires for the kids to run through.
They were quite possibly my favorite “decoration,” if you can call them that.
Also the orange traffic cones, found by accident at a nearby Winco.
I pretty much jumped up and down in the aisle when I found those.
Inspiration/Sources:
- Balloons: The Pleated Poppy
- Refueling Station idea/tire straws: workmanfamily blog (check out that amazing cake!)
- Refueling Station sign: Google Images “fuel gauge”
- Other road signs: Cksinfo (free large road sign images)
- Dump truck & cupcakes: Cake Central
- Treasure map: little old me, using basic shapes on Adobe Illustrator. I really need a class for that program.
- Tires: Eventful Possibilities!
