I would normally post birthday party posts to my personal blog, but since this one involved 2 local businesses I’d like to help promote, I thought I’d share with y’all here too!

My son Tyren (pronounced TEERen) recently had his 6th birthday party, with the theme “snakes.”

Now I’m not squeamish about snakes, so that wasn’t an issue…

My son had decided upon this theme after seeing “Todd the Snake Man“ at a Discovery Center event, and I agree that Todd and his reptilian friends are awesome, so how could I say no? I was seeing a challenge here, and feeling up to it!

My kids have had lots of unique party themes over the years: Robots, Animals, Tea Party, Mermaid, construction, Jungle, Fairy, Bugs, and more…But this is the first reptile theme. Googling didn’t find a whole lot of useful info.

Todd was booked (first time I ever paid for outside help at a birthday party for my children! And at Todd’s very affordable rates and fabulous services, I’d do it again in a heartbeat!) and I started thinking and talking to my son about ideas.

The cake design was found easily (one of the few snake-themed things I found on the web that was actually helpful)…Found a bunch of great ideas and tips on this birthday cake site.  This is a picture of Tyr’s actual cake, made by my mom (I love handing off the cake to a grandma each year! Takes one thing off my plate and we get some great cakes!) Unfortunately, his head split on the car ride to our house, so it looks a tad disheveled. But no one cared, so it was all good.

Finding ideas for decorating and activities for a snake party proved a bit more of a challenge…After some talking with others and thinking it through some more and exploring snake activities on the web…I came up with the following…

DECORATIONS:

The Entrance

Follow that snake! My daughter Maeven drew a long snake in chalk up the driveway, pointing the way to the grand snake entrance.

Snake entrance was made by my brother & husband out of a couple of large appliance boxes, cardboard rivets, paint, & a lot of creativity!

Here’s the gang at work, the day before the party, making the snake.

Inside
Since I was unable to locate any pre-made snake decorations, I went with the Jungle Animals Theme at Party City, which included a snake. The animals in this theme are just DARLING!

Unfortunately, my pictures didn’t turn out great, as I asked my brother the photographer to take the pics, so I didn’t work too hard at mine being great…But I’ve not been able to get the pics from him yet, so I’ll have to swap out these less-than-quality pics with his once I get them.

The Party City themed kit was awesome because there were tons of great decorations and fun stuff all there in one box, and all I had to do was add cake, snacks and more streamers! (Also added large plastic snakes found for a $1 at Walmart!)

I also added dollar store purchased solid-colored plates, cups, and napkins, as I always do…This is my trick for stretching out the theme in the most effective way: I alternate themed napkins with a solid colored ones and fan them out to make the cake table look pretty…Also, alternate the plates and cups the same way (minus the fanning), and always throw in lots of dollar store solid color streamers of the picked theme color for the party…in this party’s case, 2 shades of green. Since the dollar stores (in our area its Dollar Tree and 99cent Clearance Center) only had light green, I headed back to Party City to get the darker green. They have a ton of colors to choose from!  Also solid colored plastic tablecloths for the activity tables. Then for every party, we still get the themed feel, but I don’t have to buy as much of the more expensive themed partyware.

Clever, eh?

I even used the extra themed tablecloth over my portable dishwasher (which is always the drink station at all our parties) by cutting it in half and taping together. Worked great!

To conserve cups during the party, I like to put permanent markers out so people can write their names on their cups and thus not go through so many cups.

Coincidentally, Tyr had had a wild animal party a few years back, and I had chosen the same theme from Party City (although I had only picked a couple select items from the set at that time) and still had the cd for the theme! Added some fun tunes to the background.

In this pic you can also see the goody bags that had all sorts of fun animal-themed prizes for the kids to bring home…which was also part of the Party City birthday kit. I just added a handful of toy snakes and snake bouncing balls.

We also added lots of green streamers around the house, and Maeven even came up with the idea to put heads on them and turn them into snakes!

Here’s a fuzzy view of one of the rooms…you can see the green snake streamers hung around the blinds.

And I had the kids make some snake pictures to put up on our big bulletin board in the art area, where the activities were, along with the snakes of North America poster I found on Amazon:

ACTIVITIES:

Painting wooden snakes:

Making pencil snakes
(Dollar store pencils, different colors of pipe cleaners, googly eyes and glue!)

Making foam pictures:

 Face Painting:

And last but certainly not least, the main event,
Todd the Snake Man:

I cannot say enough about Todd. He was just marvelous! He brought in all sorts of snakes, gave a brief but very interesting and child-friendly talk on each snake and snakes in general, and gave the kids a nice long time to sit with and touch the snakes. I would absolutely hire Todd again and recommend to anyone that might be looking for an outstanding birthday!

 And at the end of our party, I put out this really fun water snake for the kids to play in. (No longer available on Amazon…probably for the best, since just like the reviews on Amazon say, ours split its head after just a few uses…but it made it through the party, so that was the important part! Here’s an alternative. No idea how good it is, no reviews yet. But it’s cute!)

Overall, I’d say the Smith Family’s first ever Snake Birthday Party was a “hissing” success! Loads of fun had by all, and we got to learn some new things to boot! 🙂

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“This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Party City. All opinions are 100% mine.“