Dinosaur party

Remember J's instructions about how to make a dinosaur cake?  Well, we finally had his party and the day before we worked together to make the cake exactly what he wanted.  I ended up using a large round pan and doing coconut frosting that we made green to look like grass.  We put a few little sugar leaves around the cake to add to the "vegetation" and positioned some dinosaur candles on the top and the sides.  The candles were the best thing; they saved me from having to mold a triceratops, stegosaurus, tyrannosaurus rex, and elasmosaurus.  Actually, there was no elasmosaurus, but J compromised on that (thank goodness!).

We kept it easy and ordered pizza and lots of cheesesticks (which are J's favorite; he calls them "bread pizza") and made a big salad bar.  For dessert, we also made cake balls but made them in the shape of ovals and coated them with white chocolate to look like dinosaur "eggs."

A few weeks ago, we put together the invitations for the party.  I bought a pack of these printable cards and envelopes at Target:

Then he chose a dozen different dinosaurs and I put their names on the front of the cards using our home printer.  Inside, I typed the party specifics.  When I was finished, J drew pictures of each kind of dinosaur:

Ankylosaurus was one of my favorites: the scribbles are his armor, and check out the club he has on the end of his tail "for whacking meat eaters," James says.

J drew dinosaur "tracks" out of chalk on the sidewalk so it looked like a dinosaur was attending the party.  He also lined up all his toy dinosaurs on the dining center to make a little centerpiece.  We used bright colors for the cups, napkins, balloons, etc., and we found the best pinata at Party City, which came to the rescue with a great selection of dinosaur products:

This guy was gigantic and heavy-duty; we had to cut open the cardboard a little to help the kids out.  Otherwise, the wiffle ball bat had no chance!

For favors, we used these cute puzzle dinosaur crayons and some wind-up dinosaur toys from Michael's, plus of course all the pinata candy:

The best thing?  This guy was very happy with his party (and this T. Rex t-shirt)!