Animal Party

My baby boys are two years old! I feel like we just had their 1st birthday, and here it is a whole year later!

I had a lot of fun planning an Animal Party birthday bash for them. I was SO excited for the big day. It ended up being a bit crazy...there were a lot of kids there, but it was oh so much fun. I think the boys had a really good time. I think they just loved all the craziness and being able to eat as many jello jigglers as they wanted. They could believe their good luck when mom just kept saying yes when they asked for more.

We started off with a story. "Goodnight Gorilla" is one of the boys favorites. It is the story of a bunch of animals escaping the zoo as the zookeeper says goodnight to each of them. So, Cory's Mom read the story to them

and when she was done, she showed them our empty cage. She gave kid a "zookeeper" hat

and asked them to go find the animals and bring them back to the cage. They followed animal footprints to the "jungle"

(Samantha's room), and found a bunch of (stuffed) animals. They gathered them all up and piled them in the cage. It was really fun. All the kids had big smiles on their faces and just kept running back and forth from the jungle to the cage.


That is where the organized party ended. I should have known (seeing as how I have TWO 2 yr olds) how short a 2 yr olds attention span is....I had a bunch of other activities planned, but they didn't really pan out. We did have a animal beanie baby toss



and we played a bit of an animal sound game with a few of the kids. I had also planned some animal dancing (we had some great music we had gotten from my mom), and a parachute animal toss, but we just didn't get to it. It still turned out great though. Most of the kids seemed to have a lot of fun with the bean bag toss. I spent A LONG time making the monkey for the toss, so I really wanted to get a picture of it with boys (they loved it). It was pretty easy with Noah

but I'm not quite sure Micah every really got what I wanted:



The boys loved all the attention they got and they really loved the food.



They were giddy happy. They weren't as interested in their presents, however. One was decorated with a couple of cars for a bow. The boys grabbed those and were off. It was all we could do to get them interested in opening the rest of their gifts. We actually didn't get through them all until the next day!

Samantha was an angel the entire time. I think she ended up being held by everyone there, but was really easy....as usual.


A few pictures of all the food:


Animal crackers, monkey food (bananas), Elephant food (peanuts), Rabbit food (carrotts), Ants on a log, Animal shaped sandwhiches, etc

I think the boys liked looking at their cake better than eating it. We made one large one for the guests and a couple of smaller versions for the boys. They were SO excited when the saw the cake, but pretty much just poked at it instead of eating it.



Overall it was a really fun day. A big thanks to everyone who was able to come. We had a lot of fun! Happy birthday, Micah and Noah! We love you!