Jungle Animal Birthday Party

Maggie asked for an "animals" party for her birthday. Here's what I came up with. All of the games were a big hit with the kids, 17 months to 4 1/2, and they wanted to repeat them.

Pin the Leg on the Flamingo Game.

I wanted to do a variation on Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and my poster board options were pink, yellow, and white. So, Flamingo it was! I looked at some clipart online and sketched a flamingo on the pink.

Then I cut out a bunch of leg shapes out of the yellow posterboard. I blindfolded the older kids and let the little ones just stick the legs on. I used sticky tack to hold everything.

Elefun - Maggie got this from Santa. We had four kids and four butterfly nets - perfect!

Feed the Monkey Game

This game was a lot of fun to put together.

I sketched a monkey on poster board, looking at clipart again. Then I painted using brown paint, and white paint mixed with a bit of brown.

I traced over all the lines with a black marker to give the monkey face a more finished look.

Next up: bananas to feed the monkey! The yellow polka dots were the best fabric option I could find. I cut out pairs of banana shapes, and embroidered the kids' initials on them. Then sewed them right sides together except on one end. We turned them and Maggie helped me fill them with beans. I used brown embroidery floss to blanket stitch the end closed, to be the stem of the banana.

These also worked as our party favors. Each birthday guest was able to take two bananas home, which left four for my kids.

Hippos in the Mud Game

All this game required was some masking tape, a brown paper bag, and some music. I made a circle on the floor with the masking tape, and taped down the paper bag in a shape of a mud puddle. The kids pretended to be animals while crawling around the circle. As you can see in the picture, Dalton didn't quite get it at first. I played some music (the 1:30 iTunes samples of songs from The Jungle Book) and stopped it when a kid was "stuck in the mud". The child in the mud won that round (and an animals sticker sheet).

Everyone enjoyed playing with balloons for about 10 minutes.

We had an elephant-shaped birthday cake.

I decorated with some green crepe paper to add a jungle feel, and these paper animals, sent to Maggie from Colette.