We recently had an airplane party for our 2 year old son.  He is just at that age that we have to stop everything we are doing every time one goes overhead so I knew this would be a popular theme with him. 

We started with invitations that were a stamped plane pulling a banner that said Garrett is 2!  They were on blue cardstock with cloud scrapbook paper as a background. I put the plane up on dots so that it looked like it was flying in the clouds.  The inside of the invite said that they were invited for some high flying fun, their flight was on 8-22 at 6:30 and to please notify the flight attendant if they couldn't make the flight. It also said that each child was allowed to bring up to 2 carryon parents. They were pretty fun.

I made each invited child their own airline crew badge complete with their photo- they said GB Airways and had an id # of 82305 (his date of birth).  I bought clear badge pockets and the clips to put them on their shirts at Walmart in the office supply section.  I was going to get the around the neck type of badge holders but these kids were just to short- even our 6 year old it went all the way to his waist. This way I didn't have to be concerned about them getting hurt on the swingset or anything. They were a huge hit- my 2 boys still wear them for at least part of every day.

Since the birthday boy is only 2 I didn't feel that we needed tons for games so we just did a search in the clouds--  I filled up our wading pool with white shredded paper and put 144 small plastic planes (airshow.com for about $3.50) scattered in the paper shreds.  They all thought that was really fun because it made a big mess but was pretty easy to clean up, we just got the rake out!!  I also made 50+ paper airplanes and had them in the yard and up in the tree house for all of the kids to be able to toss around during the party. Then for the older kids I had them find the airplane shape that had their name on in to bring to me at baggage claim to get the favor bags.

For decoration we had inflatable planes (airshow.com) hanging from trees and clouds that I had cut out from blue and white posterboards and white latex ballons left in a bundle.  My husband made this truly incredible plane shaped cake using a loaf pan size for the fuselage and a rectangle that he cut the wings and tail pieces from.  We also had plane shaped frosted sugar cookies and ice cream.

For the favor bags everyone got to take home candy airplanes that I made with sticks of gum, lifesavers ans a roll of Smarties (directions on familyfun.com).  Each of the kids got a favor bag that I made using the barf bags" from actual flights we had been on (unused of course).  We tried to make the food part of the favor bags kind of like a snack you get on planes these days so they each got a small bag of peanuts and a individual size bag of cookies.  The rest of the bag had a pack of gum and small metal airplane and pilot wings.  Each of them got to keep the name badges to. It was a very fun party with lots of easy parts to it- we just used solid blue for napkins and plates (like clouds) and I pre-scooped the ice cream into cupcake liners so that I wasn't messing with that while kids were anxious for their food! The barf bags were the funniest things to the adults and the candy airplanes made great decorations for the cake table- we had a fleet!  I also really liked that we were able to give everyone something as they left not just the kids.  We all had a lot of fun!"