Bonnie's 4th birthday - dino themed party

After having three girls I honestly figured life would be dolls, barbies, tea parties and unicorns for a long time. Everything I've bought for the past 11 years has been pink (or purple). Until this year when Bonnie has taken a very enthusiastic liking to sharks and dinosaurs and the colours blue and green. So we knew her birthday party this year would either be underwater or prehistoric themed. At first she told us it would need to be sharks, as dinosaurs are extinct (Thanks Sheldon Cooper 🤦‍♀️) but she ended up going ahead once we explained the dino situation.

My first stop was, as always, Pinterest! I created a subcategory on my birthday board named dinosaurs. So many ideas for food that I just loved! Scouring Pinterest helped me to decide that I didn't want Jurassic park or dinosaur train, or even anything 'girlie dinosaurs'. I was looking to do a very generic dino theme with greens and browns and lots of foliage. I thoroughly enjoy putting together a themed food table for the kids parties, so this party was no different. I had the party starting at 10am so I knew not to go overboard with food as small kids don't usually like to eat too much in one sitting.

We had pterydactal wings (honey soy chicken nibbles), carnivorous nuggets (dino shaped chicken nuggets), prehistoric boulders (cheese scones), dino bones (veggie straw chips), stego spikes (Doritos), hervivor heaven (veggie platter with carrot sticks, cherry tomatos, celery sticks, capsicum slices, baby quakes and seaweed rice crackers) served with Bronto snot (corn relish dip), t-rex eggs (green grapes), fossil cookies (sugar cookies with dino feet impression), fairysaurus (trex shaped fairy bread), raptor rice cakes (choc dipped mini rice cakes), Jurassic poop (chocolate covered sultanas and candied dinosaurs (the natural confectionery company jellies).


For the cake I made a batch of mini cupcakes, topped with frosting and edible cupcake toppers that I had sourced from deezee designs, arranged on a 3 tier acrylic cake stand from eBay and they were highlighted by a 6" banana cake frosted with cookies and cream icing and some of the cutest neon dinosaur sprinkles. When cake time rolled around I popped a gold number 4 candle and some cute dino candles from big w on the top.


From previous experience I have established that younger kids struggle to focus, get bored quickly and don't seem to enjoy party games that have an end result of 'one winner' so I decided to do more activities as opposed to games. I had cooked up 3 batches of play doh prior to the day and coloured them blue, green and orange. I set those up on one of the tables with a few dino cookie cutters and a set of tiny dinos, miniature trees and rock scene setters.


I bought from kmart 2x packs of dinosaur themed pencils and a pack of dinosaur cut outs for the kids to colour in and then we also bought the kmart dinosaur piniata. To fill the piniata I bought a few packs of lollies and the kmart dino party favours pack which filled the piniata to the brim. The kids all had great fun trying to bust it open but in true mama Reindl form I ended up tearing it apart with my hands and shaking it everywhere to ensure all the kids all got stuff.

In terms of decorating the room I was hell bent on not using latex balloons so I ended up settling for a few foil (recyclable) dinosaur balloons, some paper lanterns, foil swirls, hanging paper cut outs and the kmart dinosaur wall stickers. Hubby also made the most magnificent model volcano using cement and oxide which I painted and styled with sand & a dinosaur toy set. We also took some cuttings from pur garden and used some artificial plants about the house too.

We all know that kids often come home from parties hyped up on sugar, so it was my decision not to offer traditional lolly bags with crappy plastic toys. Instead I opted for cute dinosaur moulded crayons from quirky-ness custom crayons and stuck a sticker on that Leanne from lime and mortar had designed specially for bonnie's party for me. The party was a raging success and I LOVED putting this one together... maybe next year she will have her shark party?! Happy 4th birthday Bonnie!