For my daughter's 3rd birthday, she wanted "bears and tigers" for her party, so we had a backyard zoo party! We invited every child from the neigborhood in her relative age range, so we had 25 kids ranging from age 1 to age 6!  I had the yard, deck and fence completely decorated with balloons and party decorations, including some huge zoo animal mylar ballons that I had orderd over the internet. I also made zoo "cages," and placed a "little tikes" picnic table inside each of the four cages for the kids to sit in later. I had each cage decorated with balloons and signs that I blew up and laminated that said things like "don't feed the bears," and "don't tickle the monkeys."  (Each sign, of course, had a clip art picure of that animal on it).  Each picnic table also had on it little colored foam cutouts of zoo animals that I found at the dollar store. I asked my sister to be a face-painter, and she painted animal whiskers, noses and faces on the kids' faces - too cute!  After some free running-around, swinging/sliding/playhouse playtime, I brought out the cake and the party was off to a great start!  I couldn't find a "zoo" cake, so I asked the bakery to make a "Lion King" cake without any animals printed on it. The cake was green (jungle), brown (desert), with faux jungle trees on it, completed with purple outside trim and a happy birthday message to my daughter. I then ordered zoo safari animal cake toppers off the internet and placed those on top - it was adorable!!    I had all the kids come up on the deck to sing happy birthday to my daughter. The kids then went to sit in the zoo cages to eat. We brought out cake and juice to them on adorable animal face plates that I found, made by Hefty. The kids LOVED the cages and kept running in and out of them all day. After the kids were done eating, we started the games. Our first game was a toy walk that I made up to be patterned after a cake walk.  I found these little animal paw prints on the internet and taped them to colored sheets of paper. I had the kids walk around in a circle on the colored sheets to the music "the lion sleeps tonight." When I stopped the music, I called out a color. Whomever was standing on that color got to pick a toy out of this huge collection of toys I had gathered for months. Every color was called, so everyone got a toy - the kids loved it! Next, we played "Pin the Tail on the Zebra."  Since I couldn't find a zebra anywhere, I made my own.  At Kinko's, I made an oversized picture of a zebra from clip art, and my daughter and I colored it with markers.  We also cut out 25 tails for each of the kids and wrote each child's name on the tail. When I called a child's name, they came up and got their tail. We blindfolded them and they "pinned the tail on the zebra." The top three winners each chose prizes from the toy basket.  Finally, we had a zebra pinata that I had filled with smaller toys and candy.  (I ordered this on the internet, too, as I couldn't find a zoo animal anywhere!)  The kids had a lot of fun breaking it open. When they did, I dumped the rest of the toys from my toy prize basket into the center of the kids and they snatched it all up.  I had given each parent a bag with the kids' names on it beforehand for the pinata prizes, so each child ran to their parent with their new candy and toys! We then moved up to the deck again, where I had decorated my daughter's deck chair with balloons for the gift openings. I also had put a big children's playmat down in front of her chair so the kids could sit there to watch her open her gifts. To keep them occupied during the gift opening, we handed out their gift bags during this time. Each child received a zoo animal stuffed animal, plus a gift bag (with zoo animals all over it) containing zoo animal fruit snacks, a box of animal crackers and wild animal safari stickers. The kids sat and ate their crackers, fruit snacks and watched my  daughter open all her gifts.  My daughter absolutely LOVED her zoo party, and everyone loved our ideas!  It was fun, fun, fun!