Little Blue Truck Birthday Party

Bubba had his Little Blue Truck Birthday Party about two months ago and it went off without a hitch. Well, some things didn’t get done, some things were done incorrectly, and some things were forgotten, but that is par for the course for party hosting at our house. We are nearly good at it, I guess.

I am finally getting time to share how it all went down. When I was planning the party I found there were not many Little Blue Truck parties floating around out there. That left me to plan this based solely on the actual book. What?! We might as well live in the 1800’s.

Font – If you are using any book as a party theme, look in the front of the book where the copyright info is and it will tell you the font they use. This is a great way to tie your party to the book from the get go. For Little Blue Truck, the font is called P.T. Barnum. My fear of clowns kicks in a little when I read that.

Invitations – Here is the post about the invitations. Feel free to use the template! For the envelopes, I used plain brown envelopes and drew on a little waving frog with marker and colored pencil. Hi little dude!

Backdrop – I cut blue and yellow crepe paper strips into a tire tread pattern. I taped them onto a drop cloth tablecloth and hung it from the wall. The words were just giant size P.T. Barnum letters cut out and taped to regular card stock. I taped the letters straight to the crepe paper.

Food – We had PB&J sandwiches cut out with truck cookie cutter, popcorn in cute striped containers, fruit, veggies, pasta pesto salad, lollipops, and lemonade with a basil simple syrup.

Birthday Cake – Here is the tutorial on the cake.

Decorations – The table coverings were from Ikea/Amazon. I got a couple giant yellow round balloons that are an easy way to make a big impact. I also got a cow, pig, and frog walking helium balloon from Amazon. Toddlers LOVE these balloons! I threw a few dollar store stuffed frogs out on the tables as well. I made a concrete “S” and a cupcake liner “S” as in this tutorial. I also made the birthday hat for Bubba using this tutorial. Here's the list, if you want to be Wish.

Activities – We had a couple of crafts at this party. I got some foam ornaments from Oriental Trading Company that were blue trucks. They were on clearance after Christmas and they aren’t available on their site now. Keep an eye out for them next season! We also had little foam/cup frog crafts that were premade sets from Michaels. I printed out a truck image for coloring and we also had a painting wall outside in the back yard. Finally, we had a Little Blue Truck photo cut out with a bunch of animal face masks for props.

Favors – I found some sippy cups that had removable inserts for inserting your own images. I created a little cup wrap (that didn’t fit properly but I didn’t have the time to actually create a print that fit the curve of the cup) with the truck image I painted and a cheesy cute little phrase on the side. For favor bags, I cut the tops off of some blue gift bags using scissors that had the tire tread pattern on them. The bags were filled with a bendy farm animal, a flying frog, and a plain wood truck. I added a sticker to the bag with the truck image and “Thanks for truckin’ to the party!” on it.

I hope this gives you some ideas or inspiration for your own Little Blue Truck party! Beep Beep Beep!

Near Misses

I forgot to put the pesto salad out until about 3/4 way through the party. We ate a lot of pesto salad over the next few days.

I made the backdrop super early to get it checked off my list. After it was done, I realized it couldn’t be folded up and stored without totally messing it up. That meant we had that giant backdrop laying on our basement floor for weeks. The best part of that was that every night, when the Hubs and I headed down to the basement to watch TV, I got to sprint ahead of the dogs to keep them from running all over it. They beat me once, but I recovered after a bunch of swearing.

If you are using a specific font and having your printable printed at a shop, make sure you save them as .PDF files for printing purposes. If the print shop opens your Word document in Word and they don’t have the font installed on their computer, it won’t convert. I forgot to do that for the favor bag labels and you can see the font is just plain. If you save the document as a .PDF it will preserve the font, regardless of if it is on the printing computer or not.

Those wooden trucks. They are adorable, but not the best quality. I ended up using wood glue on at least one wheel per truck to secure them in place. Just a warning.