Wild Kratts Party !!!

The party
Saturday was Ella's 7th birthday party.  I cannot believe she is so big!  I wish I could freeze her.  There are so many precious moments each day that she amazes me and I am so proud every second of every day that she is mine.  I really don't deserve the abundant blessings that both of my children are, but I am thankful. 

Ella chose to have a Wild Kratts birthday party.  She is crazy about Wild Kratts.  If you don't know what that is, it is a show on PBS where two brothers teach you about animals.  She loves animals of all sorts!  Then these brothers turn into cartoons and go on a creature adventure.  She blows me away every day with some new animal fact that I know I have never heard of before.  She really has learned so much.

On with the party...there are NO Wild Kratt party supplies out there.  None.  So Momma had to get creative.  I did eventually find a place on Ebay that I could order invitations from.  They sent a digital file and I had to get the invites developed like pix.  So I joined one of those online pix places that give you 50 free prints so I got them for free (except for what I had to pay ebay).  Gotta love that!

The invitation

The front door decoration

 The decorations
I found animal plates for the kids as well as animal print plates for the adults at Wal-Mart.  They also had animal print napkins and cups.  I found these zebra print tins at Hobby Lobby and put the silverware in them.

The decorations

 I found these precious candles online.  Had to have them :)

Cute candles, huh?

 Also found these animal print slap bracelts in Oriental Trading magazine.  They have cute party stuff, usually sold by the dozen, and usually for cheap prices.  It's a good resource if you've never used it.

Slap Bracelets

The games
Ella wanted to play a couple of games.  She made this one up herself.  The kids loved it and I was so excited that they had so much fun and it came straight from her imaginative brain.  She wanted me to make them all different types of animal tails.  Right.  Instead, I found these animal print bandanas in the Oriental Trading catalog and we tucked them inside the back waistband of their pants....a tail.  Then they spread out over the yard and on "Go!" they chased each other around trying to steal as many animal tails as possible.  Once everyones tail was gone, whoever had the most won.  They played that a couple of times because they loved it so much.  I don't have any pix because I was the referee but Charles videoed it and it was hilarious!  The other game, they pulled out an animal pix that I had printed out on the computer out of a bag and had to act out the animal....like animal charades.

The winners won these "trophies" I found at the Dollar Tree.  I thought they were perfect for this themed party and I found gold star stickers to put on them to make them feel like more of an award.

Bandanas...um, I mean tails

Trophies...a giraffe and a rhino

 The cake
Ella wanted cupcakes.  But we needed a cake too...I don't know why, I guess I just had to.  So I made a six inch chocolate cake with the Wild Kratts logo on it. 

The logo cake

Of course, I used animal print cupcake papers for the cupcakes.   For the cupcake toppers, I cut and pasted some pix of the Wild Kratts from Google Images onto a word document.  Then I took them to Office Depot and had them laminated.  I then taped them to a lollipop stick to put down in the cupcake.  A little time consuming but super easy and cheap!  One of the designs was just Chris and Martin, one was of the support staff (Aviva, Koki, and Jimmy), and the other was Chris, Martin, Aviva, and some creatures.  The other design I used (which didn't photograph to well) was of some stickers that Ella had gotten for Christmas that had animal designs on them that changed when you changed direction of the sticker.

 We had neopolitian ice cream (strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate) so that is the icing I used for the cupcakes.  The strawberry cupcakes had half with strawberry icing and half with cream cheese icing.  The chocolate cupcakes had chocolate icing.  I am just now really getting interested in cupcakes so this was a chance to experiment with the icing design.  They didn't photograph as cute as they really were.

Ribbon Swirl

Ice Cream Swirl

Classic Cupcake Swirl

The cupcake tower

The total cake package :)

Snack table....grapes, cheese, chips, dip, sodas, and cake...and note the animal print balloons :)

 And finally....

The fake blowing out of candles...I missed the first shot so we did a re-do!

Needless to say, if you didn't leave feeling like you had been on a creature adventure....it was your own fault!  Ella had a blast as did her friends, and that made me happy :)