Noah’s Construction Birthday Party

A little boys dream party (that a normal human can actually pull off!) Trucks and backhoes and dirt everywhere the eye can see!

Remind me again how it is that my little baby turned 3 last month?

Like just about any little boy his age, Noah is obsessed with any and every kind of truck. So after a long deliberation between a “car” party and a “shovel truck” party we finally settled on a bit of a compromise. And by we I mean…Noah and I. Yes I plunked my child down in front of Pinterest with a his own private Pinterest board and we went to town pinning everything he liked.

We had planned his party for a week from today but plans changed and suddenly two weeks ago I found out I had 6 days to get invites out and plan a birthday party…..and get my house somewhat organized and presentable as most of these friends and family had not seen our new house yet. Riiiiight. 

We quickly went from the things super hero mommy “could do” to the things mommy actually could do. This party was a total hit and really all very doable things for an average family.

Cake:

The cake was a double layer dairy free chocolate cake and chocolate “butter-free” buttercream icing, because we had some sweet friends who can’t do dairy coming. It turned out pleasant but not fantastically blow your mind pleasant so I’m still tweaking the recipe on this one. It was however amazing for the kids who normally don’t get to eat cake with all their friends so a definite win in that regards.

I tripled the batter recipe on accident so I ended up with a small pan of extra cake which worked perfectly for the extra dirt we needed. Adding the extra cake crumbles on top instead of digging out pieces of the two layers made it much easier to serve normal looking pieces of cake.

I crumbled up some nuts after we were sure we didn’t have any nut allergies coming and sprinkled those in the dirt to look like rocks. Since it was October I was able to snag some candy corns for the hazard cones too!

I squeezed some bits of cake together with some nuts too to make a few boulders that were mixed in to the dirt and on the cake board.

Then we topped it with new (washed of course) excavation equipment that I found at Walmart for like $5 in the kids section.

Easy peasy!

Be aware that if you are serving this to a little boy who thinks you took his trucks and put them on the cake there may be a melt down when you insist he leave the cake alone. I suggest buying extra backup matching trucks just in case 😉

Decor:

We kept it simple on the decor with our normal Happy Birthday banner and we strung some balloons together on a string to look like stop lights.

For the cake/snack table I wrapped it in a black plastic tablecloth and used pieces of cut masking tape to make it look like a road.

My dad actually is a contractor/excavator so he graciously brought over the real road crew stuff for us to use for the party. We had lots of cones everywhere!

We forgot to get “Caution” tape so we made a quick substitute with some streamers and a pen.

A few more streamers and some more balloons finished it up.

The birthday boy made an absolute haul. We were blown away with everyones generosity. My house is over flowing with toys…love 🙂

And we surprised him with a birthday bike which he was super excited about.

He was also really really excited when we finally let him have the trucks off the cake.

Food & Drinks:

We went with contractor orange Gatorade as the drink of choice for the night. It was out on a self service table in the house which was not a good idea.

I’ll let you imagine this x 15 kids in my house.

Outside is a definite yes for the drink station.

We had bowls of cookies, pretzels and the rest of the candy corns out for snacking as well as some fresh fruit. A veggie tray would have been nice but I never got to it. We also asked everyone to bring a snack or side dish to share to help lighten our load and so there was plenty of food to go around.

For dinner we served a basic coleslaw with red and green cabbage and Kevin got all fancy and made homemade corn dogs for everyone which were a huge hit. He even made mini corn dogs for the kiddos with little Smokies on toothpicks!

We’ll be sharing our recipe for the homemade corn dogs on the blog next week so stay tuned for that. We even converted a few corn dog haters in the group! That’s us….saving the world…one corn dog at a time.

We managed to catch a few snippets of video during the party too….

Thank you for helping us celebrate our little guy!! Happy birthday Noah, we love you!!