Roar: The art of the dinosaur birthday party

As we know, Koala plans his birthday months and months in advance. About eleven, I’d estimate. In fact, a couple weeks ago, he asked me if he’s five and a half yet.

He had been requesting a Spiderman birthday for ages. If he had stuck to it, I would have – sigh – done it. With my own twist focused on actual spiders, of course.

But a couple weeks before I sat him down and said, “ok. tachlis (bottom line), what do you want for your party?”

And he answered… dinosaurs.

Jackpot! You must know by now how I feel about the topic. So here’s my review of the dinosaur birthday party we threw our five-year-old about three weeks ago.

It was pretty simple; I recommend it. I already had a bunch of material to use, and the rest I needed was super cheap or free. So here were the party’s ingredients:

• Decorations, which I (oddly) happened to have
• An arts and crafts project they could use within the party
• An arts and crafts project they could take home
• A reason to get dirty and enjoy
• Extras (dinosaur printouts for coloring)
• Games
• Cake (obviously)
• (was planning a DIY volcano experiment demonstration, but thought we wouldn’t have enough time; looking back, we totally should have done it)

We decided to take deep breaths and throw the party at home in our apartment, as opposed to last year’s, outdoors. It was a learning experience. The decor: Mostly hanging pterodactyls, strung from the ceiling fans. A set of items I inherited by way of a retired school teacher across the ocean. Crafts project #1: Dino feet. After lunch, the kids designed their own set of dino feet, cut out from construction paper. The idea was they could then wear them for the ‘dino races’ later on (which were essentially variations of the egg-and-spoon race, which these sabra kids thought hilarious). Crafts project #2: Fossils. First, I attempted this for fossil-making Too flimsy for what I wanted to do. So I used DAS clay instead (25 nis, made about 17 or so ‘fossils’). I used plastic dinosaurs (look familiar?) to make the imprint. The kids painted their fossils out on the porch after the… Fossil dig! The ‘get your hands dirty’ part of the party. We filled a giant plastic tub with 60 liters of fresh clean dirt. The kids chose three cards from an envelope; the items listed on each – dinosaur, dinosaur ‘egg’, dinosaur head, dinosaur ‘fossil’ imprint – they had to ‘excavate’ from the tub: And of course… the most fun to prep, the most fun to eat – the cake: My newly five-year-old boy had a roarin’ time. And the aftermath in my dishrack – well the after-aftermath, once the house was put back together – made me smile.