Planning a Duel Theme Birthday Party Camp out!

I thought I would share the kids combined Birthday Party and planning with you all! Since Ava's birth we have celebrated the kids birthdays together because they are 3 days apart!

Here's how we do it...

We celebrate together with our close friends and family. The past couple years we have hosted an extended overnight camp out. Parents and kids stay overnight to celebrate. We start mid to late afternoon and festivities include dinner, cake (of course) swimming, playing, dancing, camp fire, marshmallows, sparklers and just loads of free play and fun!

Invites are sent by email because that works best for us and our friends. You may want to mail them. There are countless printables for this online. We remind everyone month's in advance and then another reminder with more details about a month prior depending on who I have spoken with already.

This years themes were Minecraft and Frozen 💙 This was a super fun party to put together, and I will share a few things we do to make our outdoor parties a fun yearly event!

Planning...
I've mentioned in the past that I use spread sheets to plan most things including holidays and materials for unit studies.

I start planning about one month in advance in terms of any last minute purchasing/ordering for the kids, decorations, food list, etc.

My VERY simple spread sheet looks like this.

I start this list 4 days before the party. I also have amazon wish lists that I start months in advance saving things that are possibilities for gifts or decor. The length of your list will depend on many factors and this year this length of time for last min planning worked well for us.

Our party arrivals begin after 3 pm in the afternoon. This provides us all morning to finish set up, and decorate. We have lots of time for a quiet lunch and showers etc.

 The week of the party we try to cut the grass on the Monday and again on the Friday because it requires basically no raking and less cuttings on all those bare feet being tracked into the pool and house 😃

We set up a change room area in a finished space we have in the garage. The floors are concrete so we lay down foam puzzle mats, and we make sure there is a surface to place bags etc. This helps tremendously relieving water in the house. If you cannot create this there are very inexpensive options like this one!

Note on Pool Safety: We pick up extra floats and arm bands at the dollar store or where ever to make sure there are a couple extras on hand. The parents of our small guests all attend the party so there is always AMPLE supervision, because this party usually has nearing 20 children attending of various ages. Our party is also BYOT (bring your own towels).
We also make sure we have a our first aid supplies topped up with bandages Polysporin and such.

A couple of years ago we invested in a very reasonable party tent from amazon. Ours is 12 x 30 feet and has saved us on occasion during brief showers. We had rain at dinner this year to it was amazing to have!! ** UPDATE** We have used this tent for four years now and it has held up amazingly well! We are really careful to take it down when not in use because I don't think it would do well in high winds.

We have tables and chairs that we have collected over more the last 10 years that are wonderful! This is the best price I found for the tables, and the chairs are best to find on sale. I love this stuff because it is easy to flat store in the garage!

I bought these white tables cloths to fit the tables that are cleaned and stored. They provide a nice reusable base for theme overlays.

We mainly only decorate the tent and table and under any umbrella's in case of rain. One half of the large tent is for each party theme.

We bought all of our balloons, plastic table cloth overlays napkins, paper plates and paper cups at Walmart this year. They had great colours and really at .97 cents per pack we were able to get everything we needed for both themes for about $20! Not bad.

The Frozen Pinata was from Walmart as well. Our Frozen and Castle wall hangings were from amazon as was the large Frozen balloon hanging in Ava's section.

We have a large play structure and sand area so many kids are playing in various spots.
This is a camp out so we celebrate well after dark! We have flood lights set up here and there especially on the pool. This year we lit up a maple tree beside our ground level deck with Christmas lights and hung a disco ball over the center for fun! We also pinned strands of little globe lights the length of our clothes line that lit everything up to the play structure.

  

 I make their cakes every year. Sometimes this can be stressful because I am NOT in any shape or form an expert cake decorator. I do bake often though and enjoy this part so with Pinterest help things go pretty ok :)

The giant pearlized gum balls on Ava's cake were from Walmart in the party section. I bought the snow flakes from amazon as well the silver cake wires. I love these because I can reuse them and they were sooo pretty! Her Glowing lit up candle was from Walmart as well.

Duff Decorating, Decorative Cake Wire Hooks 8P

Edible Snowflakes Sugar Decorations (15 pc)

I printed two mirror image Minecraft Pickaxes and laminated them together for his cake topper. 

I really wanted something larger so this worked well. 

I used basic store bought (for both cakes) chocolate icing and the natural colour fondant squares were from this fondant kit. I simply took globs from each colour a rolled it out and used a square cookie cutter to get uniform square to apply to the cake in a random pattern. You can cover the entire cake, but I found this quick and easy to get a cool pixel effect!

Follow Cherine Making Montessori Ours's board Cake Decorating Tips on Pinterest.

I bake cakes for us all (daddy does mine) every year, so there are a few things I have invested in over the years.

I have these cake plates, cooling racks, cake pans, decorator set, and off set spatulas (two).

I use these colourants for icing...

Party Favours...

Party favours can be crazy expensive and we have a large number of kids so we keep it simple. Our party favours are super simple we use white favour boxes from the dollar store. They are in the wedding/party section. We fill them with assorted candy. Fill yours with something that works for you and your guests:) I make the tags myself. 

There are a large variety of tags, images and printables to use online to do this. Xander's this year features his Minecraft character:)

We always make a few extra because sometimes a box gets dropped or misplaced...  so we make sure there are a few more.

We create a fun play list of about 5 hrs in duration. We have a small camp fire pit and we roast marshmallows and light sparklers 😃

In the morning we have a pancake breakfast! Kids usually are swimming again and lot's more playing going on.

These parties are all about the kids enjoyment and playing with theirs friends. I will admit that we LOVE all of the mommy's and daddy's that we are so blessed to spend time with as well!!

Well that's it!

Thank you for taking a tour of our Party and Planning!!