Make Way for Ducklings 3rd Birthday Party --I based my daughter's third birthday party on the book Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey. I chose this idea because my daughter loves playing in water. For the invitations, I scanned a picture of a happy little duckling from the book and printed it out using blue ink. Then I matted this picture on blue cardstock and wrote by hand underneath in blue ink, Make Way for Eleanor!" On the back it said it's time for Eleanor's special day" and then the party information.   For the decorations I just used balloons (light green dark green and blue). The food table had a blue cloth and the centerpiece was a potted plant with a Beanie Baby mallard duck sitting under it. As the children arrived they could do two craft projects. One was sponge painting with ducky-shaped sponges and blue paper. The other was puppet making. I had cut out duck shapes from white cardstock and taped them to craft sticks and the children could glue on wiggly eyes and feathers to decorate their duck. After the crafts we read the story Make Way for Ducklings and then it was time for lunch.  For the lunch I served three platters of ducky-shaped sandwiches cut with a cookie cutter.  Each kind of sandwich was surrounded by a "nest" made of pretzel sticks shoestring potato chips or crispy chow mein noodles. We also had deviled eggs apple slices goldfish crackers Keebler "Bug Bites" (mini graham crackers shaped like bugs) chocolate milk and apple juice.   After lunch the children could play in the Duck Pond. For this I had two wading pools and about 8 or 10  dishpans or tubs. One wading pool was full of prizes which the kids could fish out and put in a ziploc bag labeled with their name to take home. The prizes were rubber ducky squirt toys rubber fish and frog squirt toys and small plastic swans  (from the wedding favor section at the dollar store). The swans were  there because in Make Way for Ducklings the ducklings see a swan boat. The other wading pool and all the dishpans/tubs  were full of water toys which were not to take home but just to play with --squirt toys cups cute sponges a fishing rod game etc. When the children were finished playing in  the water we had three games. The first game was an egg relay race. In the book Mama Duck worries about her babies being run over by bicycles. Each team had a bunch of styrofoam craft eggs sitting right by a bike and they had to take turns picking up the eggs and running them to their "nests" (baskets) at the other end of the driveway. After that we played Duck Duck Swan and the last game was a Duck Search where the children hunted for the missing baby ducks. These were stuffed ducks from Oriental Trading and they got to take them home.    After the games it was time for cake and presents. The cake was made in the Wilton Rubber Ducky pan but I frosted it to look like a mallard instead of a rubber ducky. It had chocolate frosting on the body dark green on the head yellow on the beak and a Junior Mint for the eye. Besides the cake we had green Jello jiggler frogs ice cream nests and lily pond punch. The nests were waffle cups filled with mini scoops of chocolate and vanilla ice cream to be the eggs. The punch was blue Hawaiian Punch served in a punch bowl with a silk water lily and a small rubber frog floating on top. The punch was really cute and so easy to do! I got the silk water lily in the garden section at Menard's; For the party favors each child received a plastic beach bucket containing egg shaped sidewalk chalk egg shaped bubbles a bag of gummy pond creatures (worms fish frogs) a bag of speckled bird's egg jellybeans some frog stickers a ducky cookie cutter and a ducky lollipop. I made the lollipops using Wilton candy melts and their rubber ducky candy mold only instead of making the candies look like rubber duckies I made them look like mallards with brown bodies green heads and yellow beaks. Besides the buckets the children could also take home their duck pond prizes their stuffed duckies and their art work."