Dinosaur Tea Party

What is better than a dinosaur birthday party? A dinosaur TEA party, of course! Duh!  I know you're all anxious to hear about all of the details, so here they *all* are. With about 746 pictures. Enjoy!

I have been going through a pretty big dinosaur phase - I can pick out pterodactyls, triceratops, apatosaurus, and t-rexes, and I like playing with my dino toys, so Mommy thought it would make a pretty good theme for my 3rd birthday party - *especially* since Suzanne had just had a dino birthday party for Evan and sent us a HUGE box o' dino stuff.  HUGE.  Pretty much Mommy's plan is now to copy Suzanne's theme every year because 1) Her parties are awesome and super-crafty and amazing and 2) Most of the work would all be done!  We hope Suzanne is on board with this plan...

Anyway, Mommy was talking to someone about my upcoming dinosaur party when I interrupted to say I wanted a TEA party.  "I want to drink tea with my friends!"

O-kay...

Mommy shifted gears and threw her all into a dinosaur tea party and it came out pretty great - she even made the one thing I fixated on and asked for over and over: a Green Dinosaur Cake.  I told pretty much everyone we came into contact with for the past few weeks that I was going to have Green! Dinosaur! Cake!!!

Are you ready for the details?  Here we go!

Decorations & Details:

First of all, have you ever seen a more perfect dinosaur tea party tee?  No. Of course you haven't.  Mommy got a Passover tee shirt from Rachel for me way back in April and *knew* she'd be the perfect one to tackle my birthday shirt.  She totally didn't disappoint - I love my dino shirt!

I was not the only one all dressed up - Baby Lulu got into the dino spirit with a SUPERcute pillowcase dress with a dinosaur applique from 2 Mamas Tees.  Tami and Deb were AMAZING - they put together Lulu's adorable outfit and shipped it to us in record time.

 For decorations, Mommy mostly kept to a color scheme of aqua and lime green, with some pink accents thrown in. (The pink was as a result of a crafting fail; originally the dino planter centerpieces were supposed to be a "magenta-y red," but they came out pencil eraser pink instead.  *I* don't mind - I like pink!)  We used a TON of Suzanne's goodies, including the inflatable dinos, the cute flagged straws, some penants, and the dino-shaped crayons.  Cousin Meredith put together some pterodactyls to hang using green pom-poms with foam board wings.  Meredith also helped Mommy cut out a bunch of stegosauruses (stegosauri?) on scrapbook paper, which we then glued to card stock.  My friends all added their hand prints as the dinosaur plates/spikes and then Mommy popped them in a $1 frame as a party favor - she painted each party-goer's name and 2012 on the frames the night before.

One of Mommy's early projects, and a favorite detail of hers, was the dino planter centerpieces.  They were a bit more of a project than she anticipated, but they came out great! She went on a dino hunt for hollow toys, which she cut with an exacto knife.  Then she painted them pink (oops!), gave them a quick shot of clear spray paint to seal them, and tucked in succulents from Lowe's.  LOVE them.

Stationery:

You don't mind that I blurred some parts out, right? Don't want to make it *too* easy for the internet stalkers!  That phrase on the bottom reads "No presents please - Just your presence will make my party dino-mite!"  First of all, I have a TON of stuff - seriously, I could open my own branch of Toys R Us - no one *needs* this many toys.  I received presents almost daily from the end of November to the beginning of February given the timing of Hanukkah and Christmas and Lulu's birth! Secondly, it was nice to be able to invite people without feeling like you're begging for gifts.  A few people ignored Mommy, which was okay - I got *some* presents, but a way more reasonable amount than last year.  A few of my friends also brought me bags of hand-me-downs so now I have a great fall wardrobe!

We set up 3 food stations, and each had its own menu board: Carnivores, Herbivores, and OmNomnivores.  (You know, om nom? ::giggle::)

Labels, labels, labels! The top two were labels we used for my pushcakes (more on those later!), and the bottom was for the bottled water.  Special thanks to Cousin Amy for de-labelling 70 mini water bottles so Mommy could customize them.  *Some* people might not relabel all those bottles, but Mommy is a special kind of crazy.

These are my Thank You cards... the photo is from a family portrait session that our friend, Carl, did a few months ago - as soon as Mommy saw it, she knew we'd use it somehow for my party!

Food:

 

Uncle David manned the grill and made Brontosaurus Burgers and Dino Dogs.

For our vegetarian friends, we had 4 types of sandwiches: peanut butter and honey on dinosaur shaped cinnamon raisin bread; cucumber and dilled cream cheese on bread rounds; tomato, mozzarella, and pesto mayonnaise on sliced baguette; and teapot shaped wheat bread topped with granny smith apples, extra sharp cheddar, and honey-dijon mustard.  YUM.

 

The hummus cups were another idea stolen from Suzanne; Grammy Boo scooped hummus into the bottom of a cup and stuck in some celery and green beans - it looked like dinosaur grass and was a surprising hit!

Ahhh, yummy, black cupcakes...  Ummmm, NO.  I need to back up a moment and talk about Baking Day; after staying up until the wee hours of the morning getting ready for my Mickey party last year, Mommy was determined to get as much done as humanly possible ahead of time this year.  Since Grammy Boo has two ovens and a spare freezer, Mommy decided to spend a day at Grammy Boo & Coach's house and get all of the baked goods out of the way.  She also tricked Aunt Angela into coming over to help; I think Aunt Angela already has plans to be "out of town" for baking day next year.  It did not really go well.

The first problem was that I wasn't really in a cooperating mood, and Lulu was uncharacteristically cranky, so instead of sending us off to watch a movie with Coach while she and Aunt Angela worked, Mommy was stuck with one or both of us hanging off of her the whole morning.  The noise of the mixer was drowned out by crying and screaming as Lulu expressed her disdain at Mommy paying anything but 100% of her attention to her, and I threw tantrum after tantrum.

Baking fail #1 was our "Fossil Cookies." Mommy totally planned to use an internet recipe to make shortbread cookies and then imprint them with my dinosaur toys to create fossils. Well, since everyone was in such a brilliant mood, she decided to just skip the grocery store and use slice-and-bake sugar cookies instead of from-scratch dough.  The dinosaurs kind of stuck in the cookies until she and Aunt Angela devised a dip-in-water-dust-with-flour method for each imprint...and then the cookies spread as they baked so all the imprints disappeared!  Sad.  Mommy melted some chocolate and added a layer to the bottom of each cookie and they were pretty yummy, but they weren't especially dinosaur-themed.

Baking fail #2 was a biggie.  Mommy was planning to make blue velvet mini cupcakes to use in our pushcakes.  I don't even know what to say about the resultant mess, but you can see it in the photo above - they came out misshapen and kind of...gray.  Frankenstein's monster cupcakes.  Luckily, they tasted good, and once we labelled the pushcake tubes it wasn't noticeable, but definitely not what we were going for.

Anyway, even for all of that fail, we ended up with a ton of tasty treats...

The pushcakes contained the horrific-looking-yet-tasty cupcakes, with some cookies and cream filling and vanilla frosting on top.  Mommy thought they were a teeny bit over-sweet, but it didn't seem to stop any of my friends!

I think my Green Dinosaur Cake might be the highlight of my life so far.  Green.  Dinosaur.  Cake.  It was all I could talk about in the days leading up to my party, and it did NOT disappoint!

It was green inside AND out - vanilla cake with food coloring, and pistachio Cool Whip frosting.  The adorable little fondant dinos on top were courtesy of Mommy's *incredibly* talented friend, Melissa.

And then there was one more dino dessert surprise:

One of the first things Mommy told Daddy about my party preparation was that he would not be responsible for rainbow fruit kebobs again this year...  He knew better than to be relieved about that (he knows Mommy pretty well by now), and was a little wary of this year's fruit project.  It turned out to be easier than he anticipated, though, and my T Rex watermelon looked absolutely AMAZING.

So cool.

Finally (is *anyone* still reading this?), we had some drinks to wash all that delicious food down.

We had Prehistoric Punch (watered down juice - Mommy generally doesn't give me the full strength stuff), Iced Tea (of course!), and Swamp Juice (blueberry lemonade).  Mommy froze some lemon slices and floated them in there to keep the drinks cool, and we also had my bottles of water, but they were camera shy...

I just had the best time - it was so great to see my family and my friends! And Green Dinosaur Cake!

Poor Baby Lulu just can't keep up with me.

SUPER special Thank Yous to everyone who helped out with putting my special day together: Aunt Angela for living through Baking Day, Cousins Amy and Meredith for running countless errands with us and arriving early to be decorating elves, Grammy Boo and Coach for picking up my balloons and transporting all of the baked goods - and for letting me sleep over after ingesting half of my body weight in sugar, Ethan for applying my supercool dino tattoo and general helpfulness, Melissa for taking me to the pool while Mommy put together last minute details, and ESPECIALLY Daddy for putting up with us and Mommy's Pinterest addiction.  Love you!