Miss Mia has been an animal fanatic for as long as I remember. So, for her birthday party I had a genius idea to take a few of her friends to the zoo. The night before the party, I switched game plans for fear that the zoo would be crazy on a no school Friday. Since the party at the zoo was just going to be an exploration with a breakfast break, I had to come up with some games and a out door venue. The venue was easy and next to the zoo...Japanese Gardens that I love. Games--well they got creative. We started out with a tour of the gardens so I could set up the clues for the scavenger hunt. We happened to find a cute little turtle trying to find its way to the water
After we eat some deluxe waffles for breakfast. Too bad I didn't take into account that the wind would blow up dirt and get in the whipped cream. Most girls found away around the dirt nonsense.
When everyone was "full" or at least incapable of swallowing any more dirt, we started the scavenger hunt. As a funny side note, some kid was doing a photo shoot for his senior pictures. One of the camera helpers had brought his kids who were bored and found some of our clues around the garden. They took the clues down, but had the decency to confess and return the clues. I made up the rhymes for the clues quite late at night and had to remember various spots of note in the garden to hide the clues. I also felt driven to tie in the animal theme since it was supposed to be a safari b-day party. The goal--find a lion that escaped from the zoo. To give you an idea, one clue for the bridge with vines had references to camels and water divine (so we could rhyme with vine). They eventually found the lost lion under the waterfall.
The next game was a creature drawing game. The idea was to take a tri-folded paper and draw one part of an animal. Everyone had to draw one head, one torso, and one feet area. The girls switched papers after they drew each portion. So in the end, the creature would have been created by 3 people. Confused, well, the girls were too which made it even funnier.
I had two more games, but we had run out of time. I asked the girls in the car if they had fun. Resounding YES! I should have left it there. I then made the mistake of asking if they were sad that we didn't end up going to the zoo. Again, Resounding YES! Oh well. . .Mia loved it and said it was her "best birthday ever"!
