Birthday party fit for a future firefighter!

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, all Aidan could talk about was garbage trucks. He was fascinated with watching the garbage truck come to our house and pick up the garbage, he always pointed out garbage trucks on the road and pretended everything was garbage. Being the attentive parents we are, we of course bought him a garbage truck for Christmas. Immediately after Christmas, he was suddenly obsessed with all things firetrucks and the garbage truck that we so deliberately sought out, sat untouched!
Well, when I began thinking of ideas for his birthday party, I immediately thought of firetrucks. In researching a firetruck theme, I came across this tutorial for making a firetruck cake (originally from Family Fun magazine)and it was decided.
My first objective was to find invitations. Though I have made the invitations for the kids recent parties, I wanted to do something different. I found a photo invitation that I liked, uploaded my pictures and ordered them in a fraction of the time that it would have taken me to even make a mock up invitation by hand.

Once the invitations were finished, I began to work on the decorations for the party. I found and printed some symbols of firefighters, a fire hydrant and a crest. I cut them out and traced them onto colored scrapbook paper and dressed them up with some markers. I added "The Firefighters Prayer" and a picture of my little cutie next to a real firetruck made to look like an award for Firefighter of the Year. Finally, I printed a few templates for dogs and cut them out. Then I had the kids cut out black dots and glue them to the template to make dalmatians. They had so much fun cutting and pasting that they kept asking to make more! I added all of the decorations to the kitchen cabinets where the party guests could enjoy them while they got their food.


I purchased a few plastic fireman hats at the Dollar Store for the guest of honor and all of the guests under age 5. Along with the firetruck shirt (from a set of pj's we purchased on clearance at Gymboree), the birthday boy was looking pretty cute!

The final element was the food. Though I wanted to have food that went with the theme, hot dogs, hot wings and four alarm chili, we thought that BBQ pork and cheesy potatoes was a more favorable option for our guests. I made the firetruck cake according to the tutorial I mentioned earlier. Besides the fact that the cake was dark pink rather than red, I think that it turned out pretty cute! And most importantly, the Birthday Boy loved it!


The birthday boy received so many wonderful gifts.


On a side note, I tried to create matchsticks by dipping pretzel sticks in white chocolate (colored red)like these from Modern Moments:
Unfortunately, mine ended up looking more like they were intended for a bachelorette party (sorry, image too x rated for this family blog)than for a 3 year old boys party, so we ended up eating them ahead of time and hiding the remainder before the party!
Despite the match stick debacle and the pink firetruck cake, the party was a blast and the birthday boy and guests had a great time!