Our little Gia is dinosaur obsessed. Not sure when her collection of dinosaurs started, but every time she’d see the rubber dinos in a store, she just had to leave with one. She loved Fieldstation Dinosaurs in New Jersey, and so when it was time to decide on a theme for her birthday- we thought dinosaurs would be a perfect fit and her little guests would love it too. Rather than throw her a party at Fieldstation, for a more affordable option we took her and a friend the day before, and then brought the theme to life the next day for her party outdoors.
Since her birthday was in May, we had access to a family member’s backyard and decided to host it there. We began collecting dinosaurs from the dollar stores and also ordered a bag of small dinosaurs from Oriental Trading to go home with the guests. We also ordered blow up dinosaurs, masks, and dinosaur party hats from OT. Much of the rest of the decor was stuff we already had, along with a few Target runs to the dollar section.
The Cake Table: For the focus of the table, we went with a simple round cake with chocolate frosting and cookie crumble to mimic dirt. We then placed one of the dinosaurs on top- with a party hat we had glued on the top of several of the dinos (simply rolled some cute craft paper into a hat shape and hot glued a pom pom on top). We stuffed fun green polkadot bags with medium and small dinos for guests to take home and added some of the larger dinosaurs to the table. We used a crate to add some dimension to the table, and placed some greenery on top with moss inside for the dinosaurs to stand on. We also had a wooden box with faux grass inside to add to the look, and a bamboo runner we had kept from another party theme. Rather than just a green tablecloth, we also bought one of the cloths that line the sides of the table to finalize the look.
For the digging: We used a water table we had to make into a sandbox for the kids to dig for dinos. We used a bunch of the small dinos and buried them inside the sand for kids to find. We bought a 5 pound bag of sand at Home Depot and found a few sets of shovels in the Dollar Section at Target.
Since our guests were mostly toddler aged- we kept it simple with the digging station and dinosaurs spread throughout the backyard to play with.
On the tables we spread out dinosaur masks we also ordered from Oriental Trading and some extra dinosaurs to play with.
The food we kept simple: hotdogs, mini sliders, dinosaur nuggets, etc. We had a separate table for the food and let people serve themselves as the food came off of the grill.
After all was said and done we had a very happy 3 year old and a dinosaur party theme success!