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Macaroni Birthdays

Plan a Farm Party!

By Jen Schorr September 21, 2012
This past weekend we celebrated my son's 3rd birthday, and since he loves horses and tractors, it was easy to decide to have a farm-themed party.  While a few of the ideas were my own, some inspiration also came from friends, internet search engines and Pinterest.  Getting ideas from Pinterest is easy if you have a money tree in your backyard.  Unfortunately, I do not, so I improvised with some things.

Decorations - I used plain colored plastic table clothes in the primary colors and white.  On the white one, my older kids colored cow spots on with a black marker.  On the yellow one, they drew a duck.  I bought balloons with farm animals on them from Party City, and my final finishing touch was a hula hoop with streamers that I hung from the ceiling in the kitchen, above where the food was served.  Then the streamers were strung in a circle.  I got lots of compliments on that.  It took awhile to do, but it was so cheap!  And you can use whatever color streamers will go with your theme.  I stuck with the primary colors.

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Food - I tried to come up with creative farm-themed names for most of the food I was serving.  Little Red Hen's Chicken BBQ, Tractor Wheels for the Oreo cookies, Haystacks for rice krispie treats, Chicken Feed for Chex Mix, Old McDonald's Mac & Cheese, etc.  To label the food, all I did was print tags from the computer onto brightly colored paper, again sticking with the primary colors.

Cake - I take pride in, and enjoy making, my kids' birthday cakes.  For Blake's cake, I just made a regular rectangular cake, and then used food coloring to make the vanilla icing green.  I iced the entire cake in green, which became the farm field.  At the back of the cake, I put a pound cake, covered in chocolate icing and Twizzler Pull & Peel strands to make it red.  I used 2 graham crackers for the doors and pretzel sticks to make the roof, and it became a barn.  Then I washed a couple of my sons Little People farm animals and put them in front of the barn.

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Activity - The best part of the party, though, was making scarecrows!  Everyone brought their own clothes for their scarecrow, and I supplied the pillowcase to make the head, and the hay to stuff them all with.  This is a great time of year for this, because everyone was able to take them home to decorate their house for fall!  There were some very creative scarecrows!  One person used just a pillowcase and made it into a cat, and another person turned their pillowcase into an owl.  I found reward certificates at the dollar store, and so each scarecrow won an award for "Sportiest" or "Best Animal", etc.  I had other activities planned, like playing Duck, Duck, Goose, and coloring farm pictures from a coloring book I had bought, but everyone (adults and kids alike) had so much fun with the scarecrows, that I didn't even need the other activities.

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