Dinosaur Train Birthday Party Decor

Logan loves the "Dinosaur Train" so we decided it was the perfect theme for his 2nd birthday party.  The house was taken over in lime green, orange, and turquoise with a few dinosaur pals around and it looked amazing!! I have to thank pinterest for this entire party, almost every idea came from there (quite a few came from Annies Eats, she can put together a great party), and I made a board which has a few followers so I thought it was about time (being 3 months later) to post these so I could add it to my board so everyone could see how it turned out.

 

The 3 foot "Buddy" balloon was a big hit, it was about the same size of Logan :)  My favorite decoration was the streamers over the window with the "Happy Birthday Logan!!" banner I made.  I used the Jurassic Park font, which came pretty close to matching the dinosaur train one, plus I knew it was dino related so that was a bonus too.

 

The table looked awesome if you asked me.   We also had the cupcake tower, some dino train talking figures, dino train and solid color tablewear, and the amazing goodie bags I made.  Thats right, I made those bags all on my own using party size brown paper bags, paint, card stock and rubber cement.  Knowing how busy my job always kept me I started these 12 bags in early February to have them completed by June 3rd, and let me tell you, I finished on June 2nd :)

The cupcake tower was perfect!  I found super cute polka dot cupcake liners in matching colors on amazon.com. Lisa made cupcakes toppers, we made Logan a small cake covered in m&ms (since he doesnt like cake but loves m&ms) topped off with Buddy holding up 2 candles.  And we used extra m&ms to put on each cupcake (since I was not very good at guessing how many we needed and got a few too many)

**sorry for the cake picture being sideways, I cant for the life of me figure out how to get it the right way on this darn blog!!**

 

I love, love, love this birthday banner, I just couldnt throw it away after the party so I laminated each one and am going to put them in his bedroom, its just so cute seeing how much he has grown over each month of his first 2 years.  I had it strung together with ribbon to hang it but then I realized that it was becoming very complicated (at least to me) and I had his amazing wire thing from IKEA where I hang his artwork, and it was just soooo much easier.  But if you dont have that you are "in theory" able to do this with ribbon and more patience than I evidently have.

This was the part of the party I thought would be great, but it wasnt, and it was the biggest pain in the bottom EVER!!!  They are supposed to be dinosaur eggs, made from painted personal sized watermelons, seriously how great does that sound.  I think 2 year olds were too young, and I think there would have been ways to make these easier but of course I didnt know that until I was done and wanted to pull out all my hair.  

Since we were dealing with 2 year olds and fruit that I potentially wanted people to eat I went with washable white paint.  Spray paint would have been sooooooo much easier, but then I dont think you would want to eat them.  If you wanted to stay with the washable paint sand the watermelons first.  Each one has about 8 coats of paint and you can still see the watermelon peeping through.  Plus if you hit it with a fingernail (or anything with a shred of force) it would chip.  Also this is June in Texas, we had water activities outside, once you touched a dino egg the white paint came right off :)  

Anyway, once I decided I couldnt paint anymore white paint (mainly because I ran out of time) I used lime green and orange craft paint to paint on the dots.  Again, since I didnt sand the watermelons sometimes even this paint made the white paint came off.  Luckily I only had to do 2 coats of the paint for the dots (which was good since I was doing that on the morning of the party).

They turned out pretty cool looking, and Logan did like them (but had no clue they were dino eggs), but since the paint was coming off nobody took them home so I ended up with 8 personal sized watermelons!  I didnt want anything to do with them by this point, so Mom washed off the paint in the sink (it came right off) and took all 8 home and was going to cut them up and freeze them.  I went by her place a few weeks later and I dont think she had touched them, so in the end I think all 8 went to waste (which was sad) but what can you do, right!