My Daughter Keeley is nick named "Bug".  Well, she loves ladybugs to boot! So, it was only natural to plan a ladybug birthday party for her 5th birthday.    I started planning and doing a month advance. I collected  prizes for the games well in advance.  Every prize had a ladybug on it. I found a note pad, picture frame, book mark, ect. All these things I found very cheaply at the dollar stores. The invitations were round black spots made of poster board. On one side it said "Come be Spotted". The other side said "At Keeley's Ladybug Birthday Party!" Then I listed the essential party information. I didn't even put them in envelopes. We just passed them out to people just like that. Like a post card.  I bought red forks, spoons and cups. I even bought a red plastic table cloth. I then contrasted all the red with black plates and napkins.  Everything red I then took a black sharpie marker to and covered it all with black spots. I used a glass to draw the circles and then colored in the circles with the black sharpie on the table cloth The silverware even had little black spots on the handles. Putting spots took sometime and more than one sharpie. I would spot stuff when I found a free minute or at night when I was watching tv or something.  I bought 3 clay pots the same size and one much larger plastic pot and covered all the pots with Keeley's little red finger prints which I then turned into ladybugs. (A great keepsake for years after the party too!) I painted the rims of the pots with either red or black paint for more color. The day of the party I took green tissue paper folded it over the edge of the pot to the outside and then set the silverware in the pots.  My large plastic pot with dirt cup mixture. Gummy worms and all. I did the dirt cup instead of ice cream.   I also bought very small pots for each child that we painted with their finger prints and made into ladybugs for them to take home.  That was part of their "goodie bag" which were brown lunch sacks I had painted with a red ladybug stamp.   Instead of cake I got red iced cupcakes and placed Junior Mints on the tops of the cupcakes for the ladybug spots and set the cupcakes on a platter covered in green coconut.  The platter with the cupcakes and the pot with the dirt cups along with the pots containing the silverware were my table centerpiece.  No party hats at this affair. The kids were decked out it in the finest antenna. I bought plastic headbands, black pipe cleaners and black pom poms. I twisted the pipe cleaners onto the headbands and hot glued the pom poms onto the pipe cleaners. As the children came in they recieved their antenna headbands. I tried to coordinate the headband color with what they had on.  They got to take them home at the end of the party.   I Took red and black poster board and cut out a lady bug body in the black and the wings in the red, laminated them and taped the whole thing to the wall for pin the spot on the ladybug. I cut the spots out of left over black poster board. The ones closest to the wings won!   I had several other games.  I took a bag of round, flat river rock spray painted the rocks red and painted various numbers of spots on each of them.  Before the party I hid them in the living room. The game was the person who found the most ladybugs won and the person who found the ladybug with the most spots won too.  The last game was the best.  I took and cut out probably 100 or more black spots out of construction paper and on some I took a silver paint pen and put "Winner" on them.  Before the party started, I taped the spots "Winner" side down to the walls in the living room and dining room so when the kids walked in from the chair rail down the whole place was covered with spots.  Like it was decorated that way for a ladybug party. Well, before they all left, I had them take the spots down and the ones with "Winner" spots won a prize.     I filled their goodie bags with their painted pot, flower seed packs, foil covered chocolate ladybugs I found for Valentine's Day at Walgreens.    The best part of the party was that I had collected baby food jars from friends, spray painted the lids red, punched small holes in the top, covered the tops with painted spots, wrote each child's name on the clear part of the jar with a paint pen and filled the jar with 3-5 live ladybugs. You can purchase tubes of live ladybugs at certain times of the year on the internet. He birthday happens to be February when the ladybugs were available for shipment. I used the jars as "place cards" at the table.   The kids loved it.  They had to promise to release their ladybugs in a couple of days but they could keep the jars as a ladybug catcher for the times they should happen to run across a ladybug friend.   Everyone was seeing spots by the time they left but we all had a wonderful time! The mom's who came still talk about that party and have told other moms who have come up to me to say they heard all about the ladybug affair. It was the party of the year. The party of my little girl's dreams. That's what makes a party memorable!