My son is a lover of all things construction trucks. His personal favorite appears to be the dump truck, and for good reason. Just think of all the loading and dumping of things one can do with a dump truck toy. With a digger or a front loader, I suppose one would always be looking around for a dump truck to fill, but the dump truck…he, my friends, can stand alone.
It didn’t seem any other theme would suit, so we settled on a dump truck birthday party to celebrate my son’s second birthday earlier this month. Thanks to Color Me Meg, I got started with an inspiring party invitation printable (link here) and proceeded to wing it from there! I printed the invitation that Meg had created, and then I filled in the details with colored pencils and glued the printed paper onto red card stock.
I cropped and printed the party invitation printable to make a few different signs for the party and labels for our party favor bags. I embraced the roll of red electrical tape that we had in the kitchen drawer and thought about how convenient it is to prepare for a construction theme birthday party when your husband is a handy man! (I am the lucky one.)
True to form, I overestimated the amount of things that I would be able to accomplish in the last couple of days before the party, and I was still making decorations an hour before our guests were due to arrive. At the last minute, I conceded the “happy birthday” bunting flags that I had wanted to make, deciding that warm food and cool drinks were more of a priority to have prepared when people started walking in the door.
I still had time to draw on a piece of recycled cardboard a large scale dump truck to match our printed signs, and my husband got home from a last minute trip to the store just in time to color it in with crayons. What a team!
I repurposed the three-part banner that I had made for our son’s first birthday that used to say “O-N-E,” and cut some more of that red electrical tape up to spell out “T-W-O.” As my sweet friend pointed out, I should be able to keep pulling this banner out to use year after year until my boy hits double digits. (Tell my husband…there is a hidden benefit to my black and white decorating trend!)
We put black covers on the tables, and used yellow and white crepe paper to make the table tops looks like a road, and we had plenty of toy trucks to set out to add to the festive feel.
A construction site cake is thankfully simple to create. I baked a white cake with chocolate icing, at the birthday boy’s request. It was decorated with a mount of crushed Oreo cookies and a (new) yellow dump truck and number 2 candle on top. It’s safe to say my boy enjoyed the cake…as he double fisted two cupcakes and licked off all the icing. What fun.
A party planner printable created by Sarah Titus proved to be very useful in organizing my plans and serving as a checklist to make sure all of the party preparations got done.
My mom and sister came to the rescue with some interesting activities for the little ones, with some plastic balls in a baby pool and some large construction trucks to play with in the yard. I featured a sand box in the water table with digging construction trucks, too.
We gave Play-Doh and stickers as party favors to our young guests. Ethan’s family and friends of course showered him with many gifts. Some of his current favorites are a wooden train set, pump action worker and crane trucks, a Play-Doh activity set, the book Fred and Ted Go Camping and a New Sprouts camp out play set. (You can shop these items directly below this post.)
Do you have birthday parties for your kids? Do you host them at home? What kind of things do you do to celebrate your son or daughter’s birthdays?
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