J’s Big Birthday Adventure: Part III- Party Time

Finally, the week of J’s big birthday party had arrived.  And we almost did not make it! Several things conspired to get in our way.  First, the lower field of our septic’s leach field went out. Please click here to view my previous septic woes. We still had one functioning field, but septic issues are certainly not welcome when you are about to have 30-40 people over who, inevitably, would like to flush the toilet without issue.

The second was that Juliette came down with a cold and managed to have a fever which kept her out of school on both the Thursday and Friday prior to her party.  We went back and forth to the doctor’s to get tested for ear infection, strep and flu. All negative. J, herself, remained in high spirits throughout. However, I felt the need to proactively send an email out to her class to let the parents know that although she was fever-free and the party would go on, we would certainly understand if anyone wanted to drop out to avoid potential germs.  No one really did.  Getting sick is a constant thing in daycare. I think most everyone else has made peace with that.

Third, and most importantly, despite a beautiful fall here in the ATX, the weather on that day never really rose above freezing.  This put a huge damper on the planned activities, namely the Dora map adventure ending with a piñata and play time on J’s house with a slide. We were also going to borrow a bouncy house, but it was just too cold.

Not easily deterred, I abbreviated the map adventure and added an indoor component that required searching for Dora’s explorer stars. Dora’s explorer stars are cute pastel stars with faces on them that have the points of the stars rounded off. Needless to say, I did not have the time to cut out a bunch of stars on the night before the party. Instead, I found some foam stars at WalMart. They were red, white and blue- leftover from the 4th- so not ideal, but they had to do.

View this document on Scribd

To start the activity, my helpers rounded up the kids, got them to quiet down for a moment or two, and each was handed their Backpack or Rescue Pack.  I explained to them that their first mission as Explorers was to find the explorer stars hidden in plain sight throughout the house. Inside their backpack was a magnifying glass to help them find the stars. Each Explorer who brought back at least one star could pick a prize from the prize box.

Next, we bundled up the kids and headed outside for the map adventure. I informed the kids that Swiper had stolen the birthday piñata, and we had to follow the clues on the Map in order to get it back. We had go through the Dancing Trees, around Crocodile Lake and onto to Play Park, and there we would find the birthday piñata.

For the Dancing Trees, I had good intentions to actually go out and pin faces to my trees. Alas, I ran out of time, but I did have the kids take out the maracas in their backpacks and dance to the Coconut Conga. In the Dora TV series, that is how they get the Dancing Trees to open up a path to allow them to pass. I used the video below as my inspiration.

For Crocodile Lake, I placed a blue sheet in our fire pit and placed a blow up crocodile on top.  Actually, it was a blow up alligator ring toss game, but I figured three year olds would not be so discerning.  We did not play the ring toss game due to the cold, but we did need to find a way to get around the crocodiles safely. Fortunately, each kid had a flute in their trusty backpack. They played their little hearts out, which lulled the “crocodile” to sleep and allowed us to walk around without incident.

Finally, we arrived at Play Park.  We were supposed to take our Dora and Diego blow outs out of our backpacks and sing the “We Did It” song, but it was really cold, so we went straight to the breaking of the piñata.  Each kid got at least one turn before the adults helped to liberate the candy.

The kids really wanted to play on J’s playscape at this point, and the parents really, really wanted to get back to the warm house, so cake time it was. I think the kids had a great time despite the weather. My only regret is not taking more pictures. But chaos does tend to ensue with that many three year olds!

I had not planned on a part IV, but I cannot NOT discuss the decorations. So I will gear up for one more blog entry before I conclude this chapter. Until then Explorers.

J’s Big Birthday Adventure: Part II- Party Favors

I’ll be honest. After engineering over 20 Backpack/Rescue Pack invitations, I was pretty beat. But I knew my work was far from done.  The fear in inviting your child’s entire class to a party is that either a) no one will show up or worse b) everyone will show up. I had my work cut out for me if I was to entertain a bunch of three year olds. I thought a Dora map adventure might do the trick. I planned to follow the general format of the show and sent the kids out into my big back yard to search for the birthday piñata.  Why do they have to find the birthday piñata.  Well, Swiper stole him silly.  You really need to keep an eye on that Swiper.

There can be no map adventure without Map and Backpack. I knew I needed to fabricate both of these.  Also, there would undoubtedly be things we would need to do at each of the stops on the map. This solved the dilemma of what to make for party favors. Clearly, each of the girls needed Dora’s Backpack, and each of the boys needed Diego’s Rescue Pack. Inside would be all the items needed along the way. Once we reached our final destination and broke open the piñata, the bags would be very handy for storing all the candy.

As you know, there are many crafty mommas out there. I pinned several Backpack/Rescue Pack party favor bags on my idea board here. Some of my favorites were:

Using orange and purple lunch bags or gift bags such as these Rescue Packs by Reading Confetti

Dying Oriental Trading backpacks purple as with these Backpacks by Googly Eyes and Glitter 

Using drawstring backpacks such as these seen on Etsy 

Or reusable grocery totes such as these on Mission Decorate 

I really liked the idea of the kids having a wearable, reusable bag so I narrowed down my options to drawstring backpacks or reusable grocery bags.  I found both purple and orange totes and purple and orange drawstring  backpacks at affordable pricing online. Ultimately, I went with the drawstring backpacks as they were larger and could actually be worn as a backpack.

For Backpack, I used the template found at Nick Jr. to trace the face onto the drawstring bags using Elmer’s Painter’s Pens. I traced the template first in pencil and then went over it using a fine tip sharpie. I used paint pens rather than fabric paint to fill in the color so that the work could go quicker with less chance for mistakes. The downside is that the paint pens are opaque. This was not much of an issue for the red mouth but required multiple coats for eyes and eyebrows and just did not provide the coverage that fabric paint would have. Still, I think they came out pretty good.

Step 1: Place template on bag and trace with pencil

Step 2: Trace with black sharpie

Step 3: Fill in color with paint pens. Heat set with dryer, blow dryer or iron.

For Rescue Pack, I also used the template from Nick Jr but needed to resize and tweak it a bit.

Map needs to go inside Backpack.  I used the Nick Jr map template above photocopied on one side of 8 1/2 x 11 white paper and photocopied a map of my own drawing on the other side. I searched and searched for an easy map template. The best I could find was this. I used it as a general template and then did separate image searches for the stops I chose for J’s adventure: The Dancing Trees, Crocodile Lake and Play Park. The last stop is actually J’s playscape, so I just drew that from memory. It came out pretty good for someone who doesn’t draw, and might help someone else out in the future. For PDF versions, please visit my free printables page.

Inside the backpack were the items we needed for the adventure: a Dora or Diego magnifying glass, Dora and Diego maracas, a mini flute and Dora or Diego blow outs. More on the specific purpose of these items in the next post.

The finished product can be seen below.

Again, I will not lie to you.  This is not a quick, easy project. Because I did not trust myself to free hand the face and was very careful with the paint pens, each bag took some time. I made 20 and was very thankful for one particularly long nap both J and D took one Sunday afternoon. J often sat at the table next to me coloring while I would knock out 1 or 2 bags. If I were to do it again, I would STRONGLY consider printing each of the faces in color on iron-on transfer paper.  There are several face template files available to purchase on Etsy and would have been well worth the money. I think this may have been 10x easier. Hindsight is 20/20.

Stay tuned for Party III- Party Time to find out how our adventure went.