For my son's second birthday he wanted a truck cake, so we had a party with a truck / construction theme. The invitations were on cut-out trucks (made on the computer) The house was decorated
with Yellow orange and black balloons and streamers. For games we had skittles - knock over the cardboard construction signs using jelly-bean-bags. I made these using brown material scraps
sewn into pouches. I then put a parcel of jelly beans inside the pouches as well as some rice for weight. When a sign was knocked over or the child got tired of the game, we helped them untie
the pouch and discover the jelly beans. I made card board box trucks big enough for a child to sit inside (Banana boxes from the supermarket worked the best) We set them up in a circle with a
heap of smaller cereal type boxes in the middle, we then played a variation of musical chairs (trucks) While the music was playing the kids had to be in the middle of the circle building
towers with the boxes...when the music stopped they had to run and get into their trucks. No winners for this ... the kids were only two and three. This game was a great success and could be
adapted to almost any theme. We then had a puppet show. I pinned a sheet between two chairs, and made the puppets on the computer, by printing out clip art of various characters of my sons
favorite story...in this case about a noisy truck. I stuck the pictures on sticks and had someone read the story while I moved the pictures around. (It could be done by one person, by
sticking parts of the story on the back of the cut outs) For a back up I had coloring pencils and pictures of trucks to color, and we used lollypops hidden around the yard as a treasure hunt.
For food we had a truck cake as requested - the back had a load of soft sweets on it and it looked really good. I wanted to use toy trucks for individual plates but couldn't find any the
right size or the right price so I made paper bowls into trucks by tapping straws to the bottom of the bowls and gluing bottle tops to the ends for the wheels, then folding up the front and
attaching a box for the cab. I stuck silver paper on the boxes for the windows and put the plastic spoons into the box. In the truck bowls we had chopped up jelly, chocolate ice-cream and a
sprinkle of M&M's for color. I made individual place mats by printing out various clip art trucks and decorating a page along with the child's name and a message - eg "Dylan
work's here" etc and then laminating them. As we weren't having a piņata, I made crackers / bon bons up to look like dynamite for each child. (These are easy to make! For ours, I
stapled one end of the snapper to the cardboard tube and folded the red crepe paper over on that end. I tied the other end of the snapper to a piece of string. The child pulled his own
dynamite cracker.) The bon bons had party hats, some stickers and a hotwheels truck inside them. I used a few of my sons other (cleaned!)trucks as serving dish holders, we had the usual party
favorites like mini muffins, chocolate crackles and cheerio's with the ends cut square to be dynamite, and I also made good use of a truck cookie cutter for sandwiches, cheese shapes, and
truck shaped fairy bread. The kids got to take home the jelly bean pouch, the contents of the bon bons, their own place mat, a piece of cake and a balloon.