An Owl Birthday Party

For Eila’s sixth birthday, she decided she wanted to have an Owl Birthday Party. So, we put on our creative thinking caps, scoured pinterest, got busy in the kitchen, and we pulled together a fun owl themed party for all ages!

According to Eila, and probably most six year old kids, the highlight of the party was the cupcakes – of course! I went with Katie’s no fail Vanilla Bean Sour Cream Cupcakes – it’s my most favorite cupcake recipe. To make them fit with our owl theme, I baked them in these Wilton Petal Grass Shaped Baking Cups. I topped them with twigs clipped from a tree in the yard and attached these Owl Foam 3-D Sticker Embellishments that I found in the scrapbook section at the craft store.

For dinner we had Homemade Taco Bowls, which if you’re thinking creatively are kind of like bird nests. A friend brought the adorable Owl Fruit Platter and it was a huge hit. An owl made of pineapple, apples, oranges, and berries, however, doesn’t last long!

We ate dinner under the keen eyes of crafty Balloon Owls that I copied from pinterest. I used the cupcakes as part of the table decor and nested them among a burlap garland topped with twigs, branches, and pine cones collected from the yard. It was very woodsy in an owlish kind of way.

After all the food had been eaten and all the frosting had been washed from sticky fingers, we  got down to business. The party’s main event, aside from all the food of course, was the very important task of dissecting owl pellets. It may not be your typical kid birthday party activity, after all it does involve the handling of bird vomit and dead rodent parts, but it was so fun for the kids!

I ordered this Student Owl Pellet Kit and we were all impressed with it. It came with a detailed bone chart, which was very helpful, as well as a magnifying glass and tools for dissecting. All of the pellets yielded rodent skulls and a lot of good bones. We quite literally had to tear the kids away from the pellets to open presents.

The party was a lot of fun . . . and now I have a six year old. She is a curly-haired-freckle-faced bundle of joy! She’s the only kid in this house thus far to have broken bones (two bones in one arm two months ago!) and receive 22 stitches in the emergency room, which I think says a lot about her adventurous spirit.

At six, she is now reading chapter books on her own (Jenny and the Cat Club is her most favorite book of all), getting ready to play the violin, roller skating like a champ, and loved kindergarten so much that she’s pretty convinced she’d like to be a kindergarten teacher when she grows up. I love her so crazy much I can hardly stand it. Isn’t she wonderful?

At the end of the party, we sent our friends home with owl notebooks (like these). Everyone agreed, it was a great success. Six is going to be a good year!