For my son's second birthday party we went with a zoo animal theme. It was so much fun! The invitations read "It will be a zoo when Jake turns two!" I used cardstock paper to make an invitation with zoo animals on the front and the party information on the inside. Under the party information I cut fringed grass and added to the bottom. This added alot of texture and color to the invitation. Very easy and cute. Then on the oposite side I added some zoo tatoos into a small vellum envelope that I made and asked everyone to wear a tatoo to the party! Everyone looked so cute with their tattos. Some wore them on their cheeks and others on their hands. I dressed my son in a t-shirt that I got at my local zoo that had animals on the front and said "all my friends are wild." We decorated the house and outside with tons of zoo print balloons. Some were zebra print others were leopard print and so on. We got blow up animals (my favorite was a monkey that we hung from the patio umbrella) and we put them everywhere including just around the yard since this was a 2 year old party and everyone had fun just playing with them! For the cake I took small plastic animals to the bakery and they decorated with the bears in an brown icing cave, the hippos in the blue water, the tigers in the grass and more. I also took them some small brown plastic fencing (that you can get at cake decorating stores) and they used that also. It was a great cake! For the take home gifts I gave each child a blow up zoo animal and a nice bag of plastic play animals. I put their names on each bag with animal print stickers. We also took a picture of each child before they left the party. For the thank you notes we also did something a little different. I bought inexpensive wood frames from a local craft store and painted them brown. I used the animal print stickers again to put each childs name on the front of the frame. I used mod podge to seal the stickers and give the frames a nice shine. I then used the photos of each child taken at the party and put in the frames along with a thank you note.