We celebrated a great big birthday recently! For Sam’s birthday party this year he wanted an outdoor birthday party — “Outdoor the whole entire time!”

Perfect, because the only thing I love more than a house full of little ones, is a yard full of them! I had so much fun coming up with outdoor birthday party ideas. For only $20 no less!

We planned a small party, which I think was a large part in our very successful outdoor birthday party. Including siblings we had 6 little ones here celebrating with Sam. That number seemed to work very well. As did having the party only 2 hours long.

My Sam is a busy boy, and given the fact that this was his birthday party, I knew he would be even busier than usual. To set him up for success and a lovely, memorable day, I planned out every last detail of his outdoor birthday party before hand.

I thought I would share some of our outdoor birthday party ideas here, as I’m sure you will be planning a birthday party or two this year!

One thing that I was mindful of, which seemed to work very well, was alternating busy activities with quieter activities. Even if your little ones do not tend to get too wound up, perhaps some of your party guests will. This is a nice way to make sure every one has a great time, without getting too out of hand.

Here was how our outdoor birthday party was planned:

1. Children arrive and play outside with some toys while the other guests arrived. We had a neat rocket launcher that was a gift which held the kids attention entirely!

2. Once every one arrived, we went to the patio table and painted pots. I had bought little pots at the dollar store for the children to paint and then plant a seed in to go home with. Since I wanted the pots to be dry by the end of the party, this was the first thing we did. It was also a nice, quiet activity to start the party.

3. Jump on the balloon filled trampoline! We had blown up oodles of balloons and put them into the safety net of our trampoline. It looked completely inviting and proved to be loads of fun for our little guests. When the kids were done painting they had a chance to jump on the trampoline or play on the swing set.

4. Hide and Seek. This is a great birthday party game, especially when you add in some teamwork! We played hide and seek and had all the children try to hide from Sam’s big sister.

5. Bean bag (or ball) toss. Balloons were hung up on the clothesline with clothes pegs. The children used bean bags to see how many they could knock off with 5 throws. We started this game one at a time, but it ended with all the children working to see if they could knock all the balloons off before I clipped them back on!

6. Scavenger Hunt. I planned a rather large scavenger hunt, spread quite far and wide. Scavenger hunting is one of Sammy’s most favourite activities. We did this game as a team as well. The children hunted for all the clues, which ended by leading them back to their painted pots. I changed this list to make planting seeds their second last scavenger hunt clue.

7. Planting seeds. Our guests finished their scavenger hunt by choosing a seed to plant in their (now dry) pots. Once they finished this last scavenger hunt task, they won their “pot of gold” and looked through their prizes at the lunch table.

8. We finished our birthday party with a simple lunch of hotdogs and watermelon and of course cupcakes.

As soon as we were finishing lunch parents began to arrive and it was time for our guests to head home. Sam had a lovely birthday party and managed to enjoy every single minute without getting too carried away.

It was definitely worthwhile for me to take the time to plan out this party. A little planning goes a long way!

And as always, Sam is already talking about how excited he is for his birthday party next year. Luckily I have a little while to come up with some new ideas.

Though in just a couple of months I will be planning something I have never done before … a birthday party for a TEENAGER … heaven help me.

Thank you so much for reading!

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