goodby June, hello July

One of the big events of June, was celebrating Emma' s birthday with a party. And do we know how to party....the theme was birdwatching. And as you can imagine a house full of little ones looking for birds is not your average bird watching scene, it was in fact, pretty exciting. We invited family and friends that live around the neighborhood.

I thought I would give you the run down on the shindig, in case your youngster spends a good bit of time each week watching for birds, like Emma, and would like to celebrate turning another year with their own birdwatching party.

The invites were simple, I just used one of Martha's bird stamps. I can't really show you a photo at the moment, b/c it has our address on it. So I will do my best to describe it for you.

I purchased some waste not paper over sized pink tags, with green envelopes, a few months ago on clearance. I printed the party info on a light grey paper, cut it down to a square, to fit on the tags, then I stamped the bird image onto the grey paper.

My sister in law, Kelly, made the cake-I know, it was amazing. The birdhouse is a rice crispy cookie covered in her homemade fondant.

The activities included decorating there own binoculars. Then the kids spent a good bit of time looking out our windows, through their binoculars for birds. We did this while we waited for all of the guests to arrive. And the kids loved it. My mother in law made the binoculars. She recycled toilet paper rolls, painted them black and attached colorful strips to each pair, along with a black strap.

Here is a picture with my adorable nephew with his pair.

Games:

The girls and I painted some paper birds a few weeks ago. We hung those up around the house and the kids went on a "bird hunt" once they found a bird, they pulled it of the wall. The bird they found, was then used for the next game, "pin the bird on the nest"


We painted the tree a few weeks ago. We used some matboard that I have hung onto for two moves, not sure why....


The final game, was musical nests. We played "little bird", by Elizabeth Mitchell, during the game. Each nest had a different number of eggs, who ever landed on the nest with 4 eggs when the music stopped, won a prize. We played until everyone won a prize of playdo.



For the favors, I kept it simple. We gave each guest a bird feeder made with a pinecone, peanut butter and birdseed, the playdo they one in the game and a kuzoo. Emma really likes kuzoos, and all the parents really like us for giving their kids kuzoos.



And a few shots of the decor. I displayed two of Emma's scrapbook albums for decoration and the occasional perusing.



Jot it down: Emma spotted and endangered bird in our backyard a few months ago, a golden cheeked warbler. She pointed out the bird, but our bird expertise, not being quite up to snuff, we could not identify it. We looked it up in some bird books and discovered it was endangered.
Go Emma! We have started to jot down in the books when, where and who spots the different birds.