How to Train Your Dragon Birthday Party
On a recent trip to Prague I pulled the kids into yet another church and my daughter was about to revolt when my son said, "Sofia, shhh! Maybe this is one of the churches mama prayed in to have sweet babies." And that was the end of it as she felt the gravity of the situation and acquiesced to go inside.
My kids know that they were desperately wanted and prayed for and having sweet babies after so many years of trying is indeed an event to be celebrated. Because of this, their birthday is a big deal, not just for them but for me, because it's a celebration of the day I finally became a mama. And this year, after falling in love with the adventures of Hiccup and his crew, we celebrated dragon style.
Having a How to Train Your Dragon birthday party was a lot of fun and also, a lot of work. It also meant, living in Germany, that I had to order early (and, as it turned out, often) from Amazon, to gather up all those things I simply couldn't find locally.
If you're looking to create your own
How to Train Your Dragon party, you might find (or perhaps have already found) that it's easy to go down the rabbit hole of Pinterest projects and, after coming up for air hours later, you're still confused about what exactly you want to do or how to make it happen. So, let me help you.
Invitations are the first order of business and we purchased ours from
SqPartyPrintables on Etsy. Zoila was great to work with and helped us create an invitation in German, as well, for all of our non-English speaking friends. She also has really cute food and favor labels, which you can personalize (we wrote all our food items in both English and German and they turned out really well). The backs of these invites were really cute as well, showing Toothless' tail. As
How to Train Your Dragon isn't yet very popular here in Germany, we had to specify on our German invitation that "Dragon Training" was actually a birthday party.
Your next order of business should be to decide on your cake and find a baker who can pull if off (if that baker is YOU, my gosh, please tell me where you live so I can try to arrange our next duty station within driving distance). Many bakers will require ample time for a cake, particularly if they're creating figures from fondant, so try to knock out this detail as quickly as you can and then rest assured that one of the big items can be checked off your list.
As Toothless and Stormfly are my kids' favorite dragons from the movie, they were the stars of the show, so to speak, when it came to the cake. We also added the name of a friend whose birthday fell on the day of the party. It was really fun to include him in that way, particularly as it was a surprise to him.
The next thing to work out is your menu. You can figure out all these details early for a later execution, but knowing what you'll be serving will be helpful and will help guide what you're ordering and from where, especially if your party is going to be heavy on "fun sweets." Here are some fun pictures of our menu the day of. The candy was ALL purchased on either Amazon or from Oriental Trading Company, but if you can't find it, shoot me a note and I'll send you the info.
When it came to the cake, I wanted to do something easy. Not that taking a "show cake" and turning it into 60 pieces of sliced cake on plates is difficult, but..... I thought there must be a better way. The answer was that I had enough cupcakes made for all our guests and then served them on "painter's palette's" but instead of paint we filled the palette's with sprinkles so the kids could decorate their own cupcakes. Then we passed around a bowl full of dragons for each of our guests to use it as a cupcake decoration, or to simply take home with them.
So, the menu is set and you've ordered everything you need, yay!!! Now you've got to decide what sort of games or activities you'll have at your party. We had 32 kiddos joining us for Dragon Training, so having "stations" where the kids could do a variety of activities was important.
We had face painting, which the kids loved. I had an amazing friend travel from Heidelberg to help me with all the last minute preparations and for the day of the party, but also hired an older teenager to come and help wrangle kids and she did face painting as well. As an aside, I hire a helper or two for every party we throw. It just makes it easier to manage ALL THOSE KIDS as well as having another person to keep an eye on the food, take photos, and generally help me keep an eye on things. She also spoke German, which was a necessity for me. When it came to face painting, some kids went all out and wanted dragon faces, while others (mainly the younger girls) wanted butterflies or rainbows. No matter, they all had a great time!
The Viking Armor station was where the kids had the most fun and spent the most time. I bought a few dozen shields (cardstock type paper from Oriental Trading Company) and put out loads of art supplies. I also made swords from cardboard, which I covered in aluminum foil and then used duct tape over the handles. After decorating their shields, the kids grabbed a sword and went to town protecting Berk.
The sheep toss was really fun, made even more so by these super cute sheep I made using a free template from
Frog Prince Paperie. I didn't have curly fleece so used a plain white fleece and they were still just as cute as could be.
Nowadays it seems no party is complete without some kind of gift for the kids in attendance. I found loads of cute
How to Train Your Dragon party favors online, but wanted to present them in a really fun way. This is what took the most time in party prep, but was also the most impressive as they served as decorations before the kids took them home. I made a dragon egg for each of the kids in attendance and stuffed it with the
How to Train Your Dragon party favors. Cool, right?
This may seem really difficult but I promise it's not. What it IS is time consuming. First you have to stuff a balloon with the party favors and then blow it up until it's the size you want. Next you have to paper mâché it using enough layers so that the eggs will dry hard and will be sturdy enough to be painted and coated in glitter. Next I attached favor tags for each of the kids, also purchased from Zoila at
SqPartyPrintables. Whew!
One of the things we love about Hiccup is that in the
How to Train Your Dragon movie he was always writing in a notebook. Alas, it had to fit in somewhere. So as an additional favor I made these cute dragon notebooks for each of the kids, all tied up with a pencil that looks like Hiccup himself could have made it. The kids loved it and they were super easy to make using a graphic from the pack I purchased from
SqPartyPrintables and Kraft Notebooks I purchased on Amazon.
"Astrid" was happy to be able to spend the day in a world of dragon make-believe.
Having ditched the Hiccup costume hours earlier, my sweet boy just wanted to sword fight with his friends and try out ALL the sweets.
I hope you've enjoyed seeing some of the fun of my sweet kiddos turning five, and if you're planning a How to Train Your Dragon party of your own, I'd love to know what you're up to!!