The countdown to my daughter’s birthday party is on. However, unlike in years past when she decided on a theme for her shindig two weeks after Christmas, this time around the jury is still out.
With time ticking I came up with a list of potential themes that I could probably pull off without enlisting Martha Stewart or Colin Cowie’s help. Here are just some of the fun, fun, fun suggestions my daughter will be choosing from:
Bugs: My mom is a ladybug fanatic and has all kinds of decorations we could use for the party. Granted, my daughter is deathly afraid of spiders, but this theme is all about innocent insects. While she’s not exactly a budding entomologist, I know she would love digging into a dirt cake filled with chocolate pudding and layered with Oreo cookie crumbs and Cool Whip, then topped with gummy worms. Another option could be to form a caterpillar body from a row of cupcakes. Also, party favors could include magnifying glasses, bug collecting jars and plastic tweezers.
Dinosaurs: For a while my daughter had aspirations of becoming a dinosaur. She was three. I was going to throw her a dinosaur-themed party that year, but we ended up going with a jungle theme instead. However, I still kept my notes for the dinosaur party that wasn’t. I planned to have the kids dig for bones in our sandbox, play Pin the Horn on the Triceratops and decorate dinosaur eggs. I also planned to serve dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and have the kids craft dinosaurs from Play-Doh.
Ocean Adventure: A few years ago we celebrated my daughter’s birthday in Hawaii. Back then she insisted on a “Lilo and Stitch” theme which was a breeze to pull off given that we were in the Aloha State. Since she loved that soiree so much, I thought of replicating it this year, but put more emphasis on an ocean theme. We could have fish tacos for lunch with goldfish snacks and blue cupcakes topped with red Swedish fish. I also wanted to attach a paper clip to the end of a fishing pole and have the kids cast their lines over the shower curtain in the bathroom to see what prizes they could “catch.”