Six months or so after moving here my nephew Jay turned the big 5! As a lover of alll animals, I knew a Barnyard Bash was the perfect party theme for him.
If you had read my old blog (rip kodiieebear-xo.com) then you know that I looove going the extra mile for my nieces and nephews birthday’s (some would say “extravagant” 🙄🤣) and Jay’s was no exception lol.
Luckily for me, there was no hauling suitcases crammed with birthday decorations on the plane since I was already home and that definitely made things soo much easier! After a few days of scrolling through Pinterest and Google Images I came up with an idea of what I wanted it to look like and thats when the many shopping trips begun LOL!
Once I had decided on the barnyard bash theme, my first step was to create a birthday invitation. I had seen a TikTok where someone had used their Cricut to cut out their wedding invitation and I used that same concept but changed it up to fit the theme.
I started with drawing Jay into a cartoon character on my iPad using Procreate (if I’m drawing something, it’s always on Procreate lol) which turned out super cute.
I drew a tractor and had him sitting on there for the front of the invitation and then added a barn for some space to put the party details.
Using my drawings, some sticker paper and brown card – I came up with the below invitation, I love how it turned out and it gave me so many ideas for future invitations 😆
I used the drawing that I did for the invitation and changed it up a bit to create stickers for the loot bags, chocolate coins, milk bottles and colouring books.
Speaking of loot bags, for these we went pretty simple but on theme of course. I bought some plain brown bags, added the sticker to them and then filled them with a personalised colouring book, animal themed crayons and paddle-ball toy, bouncy balls, a small stuffed animal, lollies and a few other bits and pieces.
We also organised a few games for the kids to play and added huge bowls of lollies for them to add to their loot bag when they finished playing.
The games are always the hardest to come up with, especially when you are trying to keep on theme and catering to about 50 kids of all different ages LOL.
We had the standard ring toss, duck pond and throwing an apple into the mouth of the pig (Shout out to ChaChi and Hine for their painting skills and making the pig game) but my favourites of all the game were the 2 new ones we came up with – Egg Hunt and Car Race!
The Egg Hunt game was a babies sized pool filled with straw and feathers, then I had filled plastic eggs with bouncy balls, candy and little toys and hid them within the pool. The kids had so much fun searching for treasures!
Race Car was one that I knew my nephews would like. My dad bought home a thin piece of ply wood and we painted 3 tracks on it and then filled in the blank spaces with fake grass. I used my Cricut to print out a start and finish and added them to the board as well. We initially wanted to use pull back tractors but we couldn’t find any so ended up using pull back cars instead which worked just as well!
The night before the birthday, we were busily gluing literally 100s of photos to another piece of plywood into the shape of a 5. I had painted the board red beforehand so it would blend in with the rest of the decorations.
We used it as a place for everyone to take photos so added a garland of red, white and cow patterned balloons and Jay’s name in big helium balloons.
The tables (both cake and kids tables) are always so fun to decorate. I had the idea of creating little farm scenes down the middle of the kids table using different sized plastic animals, fake grass and burlap table runners.
We then used red and white checked table cloths with matching napkins and wooden plates and cutlery. We also had the little milk bottles sitting next to the plate with a red and white straw. It all came together so nicely and looked soooo good together!!
Once we have decorated the kids table, I realised that we had some large animal helium balloons so we blew them up, added a string and then I glued the end of the string into a few of the larger plastic animals mouths so it looked like they were holding them which I thought was suuuuper cute!!
The cake table was so special as we had a photo of Jay’s uncle who had recently passed away on the table so he could celebrate with everyone.
We decided to do a dessert grazing table around the photo. My sister bought a whole heap of different cakes, slices etc from her co-worker which we scattered all over the table with lollies and lots of Jay’s favourite snacks.
For the cake, we added a smaller trestle table on top of the grazing table. Jay’s favourite cake of all time is a sponge cake and the one my sister got was suuuper delicious! I added the cake topper (which I made), some animal candles and a mini 5 balloon.
Behind the cake table we had a barn as the backdrop. Another shout out to ChaChi for doing the barn! We used the Cricut for the words and then ChaChi painted the rest of the barn and the little animals at the bottom.
The backdrop bought the whole cake table together and I loved it!
If you know, then you know my MOST favourite part to come up with ideas for these parties are of course the present area! This present area was probably one of my favourite ones I have created so far.
We went to a gardening shop and bought one of those mini garden fences and placed it in a circle. Then we added a whole heap of straw and a couple of stuffed animals in there to make it look like a pen. It looked soooo cute, although we probably didnt make it big enough because the presents were overflowing by the end LOL.
To top it all off, in true Nanny and Koko style of course Jay had the ice cream truck turn up to his party which all the kids flocked too! Jay was allowed to help make the ice creams and make one for himself too.
Happy 5th Birthday our Jay Babyyy (even though you are literally 7 this year cos I’m writing this so late LOOOOL), hope your barnyard bash was everything you wanted and more!!
Shout out to my sister for always letting me and my ideas run wild and a special shout out going to the Shed Crew for all those late night sticker parties, painting parties and just always helping with whatever you can! Ya’ll the real MVP’s 😜
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