We were so lucky to be able to rent a house with beautiful gardens on a tea estate right next to Mount Mulanje for our Gruffalo party. It was a great place to spend time with both sets of the girls’ grandparents and the gardens were a beautiful setting for one of the party games – a birthday scavenger hunt with a Gruffalo theme. I printed the Gruffalo sequence cards from Primary Treasure Chest and pasted them on card stock with the clues on the back. The clues all had quotes from the story and my Dad, who organizes a scavenger hunt for all the grandkids every Christmas, found places to hide each clue. See below for our clues and hiding places:   Will you [...] Read more »

This blog has been quiet as we’ve enjoyed my parents’ visit and celebrated the girls’ birthdays. I thought I’d post some photos of the food we had at our Gruffalo themed party. It was such a fun theme to develop a party around and I especially enjoyed coming up with the menu. Here are our Gruffalo party food ideas: For lunch we had roasted fox (a ham with some braaied/barbecued sausages and chicken pieces) and scrambled snake (a pasta and cheese bake or fancy mac and cheese). We used spiral pasta for the snakes and added some olives for snake eyes and chopped tomato for blood and guts – yum! I made some signs to describe the food with Gruffalo character printouts from Primary Treasure [...] Read more »

We decided to use what we’ve got for Kooks’s second birthday party. We invited a couple of families from town and had a beautiful picnic by the river. The kids had a great time splashing around so we didn’t have to come up with too many additional activities, but we did do a few things to make the safari party extra special. The kids each received an animal mask. I printed these off, laminated them, and duct taped a craft stick to the back. The monkey mask is from First Palette, the leopard from Color Me Good, and the rest from Sparkle Box. Sparkle Box actually has a set of eight jungle and safari masks you can print off but I only wanted to use animals [...] Read more »

Kooks is about to turn two and we are busy planning her safari birthday party. What better way to celebrate the African bush than to play with wildlife poop? Today we worked on our “make your own dung” party favors for her guests to take home. I made play dough using a recipe from Musing From a Stay at Home Mom. The only problem was I couldn’t find any brown food coloring and the play dough cooks so fast I didn’t think I’d have time to mix the colors while cooking the dough. Instead I mixed all the different food colors I had together with the water before I added it to the dry ingredients. That way I could make sure I got a nice [...] Read more »

I’m not a huge fan of Disney or the traditional princess who waits for her prince to come along and rescue her, however, as a little girl I loved both Disney and princesses, so I can appreciate the magic that comes alive when a little girl puts on a princess dress and dances with abandon. At the end of last year, my parents took the entire family on a Disney cruise. It was my girls’ first exposure to Disney and Boo was thoroughly enchanted by the princesses. My mother gave her this Princess Tiana Costume and so began the theme of her third birthday party. Who am I to stand in the way of a girl and her happily ever after? This was a very [...] Read more »