A Roarin' Party

My oldest boy, Peter, celebrated his fifth birthday last Friday, and on Saturday he got to have a party with his friends. Since Peter just LOVES dinosaurs, I decided to use that theme for his birthday party.

To start off with, I made him a dinosaur cake, complete with volcano and lake. The lake was blue jello. I made jello in a regular casserole dish, and then cut out a "lake" shape, that I had traced beforehand on a piece of paper. I then cut the same shape out of the cake and dug it down a bit, so that the jello water could fit into the cake. It worked beautifully! The "trees" and fire were just aquarium plants (fake, of course), and the dinosaurs were confiscated from Peter's hoard. Oh yes, the volcano is really just some cupcakes that I stacked onto each other and then frosted heavily.

That part of the cake seemed to be the most popular.

One of the games we played was called "Pin the tail on the Dinosaur".
Another game was the "T-Rex Stomp", which involved popping balloons without the use of hands (since T-Rex dinosaurs had such puny little ones). The balloons had little prizes in them, like plastic dinosaurs and candy. This game seemed to be very popular with the boys, as it involved lots of violence and mayhem. The popping balloon sound effects didn't hurt, either, although all of us adults in the room were feeling rather twitchy by the time all the balloons were finally popped. I HATE the sound of popping balloons.
Apparently, Miss Boo agrees with me.
Another game was the "Discover the Dinosaur Bones". After Halloween, I picked up a bunch of plastic bones at the Dollar Tree, and stored them until Peter's Party. Handyman hid them all around the house, and the kids got to excavate them from the plants, furniture, baby toys, or wherever they were hid.
(So Moms, if your child came home with bones in his gift bag, that's where they came from. I suppose I should have explained that earlier . . .)

My favorite game was "Tug-o-saurus" (so called by Handyman), involving rope, marshmallows, and lots of yelling. Two boys of the same size were tied together with rope. To keep the rope from hurting their tummies, I wrapped a towel around their waists, first. I put them back-to-back, and placed marshmallows on opposite ends of the hallway. When I yelled, "GO!", the two kids tried to get to their marshmallow first. The rest of the kids were lined up on the stairs above the hallway, cheering on their teammates.
It was very entertaining, to say the least.

Here's a short video of some of the action. Please ignore my inane comments and ridiculous cheering. Usually when I'm filming I try to stay quiet, but I was having such fun I forgot. (Oh, you should probably pause the music player on the left sidebar, first, before playing the video).