Peyton wanted to celebrate her fifth birthday with her friends by doing one of her favorite things... CAMPING!! So how do you have a camping birthday party with a bunch of 4 and 5 year olds? At our local Riparian Preserve http://www.riparianinstitute.org/riparian.cfm. We love visiting this park to go on hikes, feed the ducks, and play in the unique structures that you just don't find at regular parks.
This pictures were taken by Carrie and April since I was a little busy managing the troops. We did some rubbings. Not sure many of the kids had done this before so it was really cool to see how excited they got when the images transfered onto their papers. We talked about the different images on our hike back to our campsite. Before going on our hike I gave out trail mix and juice boxes for all the kids. (I wanted to make up our own trail mix, but it was easier to just get the pre-made ones for this party. While hiking back to the site we talked about all the different birds we were seeing and some of the plants. This wonderful park has a few large campsites you can reserve to stay the night. We used the campsite as a base for our birthday party and later had a few families stay all night long with us. I let the kids explore on their own after we got back from our hike. We set up a tent and the kids played in that too. 
We made a pinata for the camping party. We looked and looked for one Princess P liked, but decided to surf the net for some ideas on how to create our own. After browsing a few ideas..(sorry forgot where those sites are) we came up with a plan. Make a tent out of a card board box. Basically we took the sides of a box a put them together making a triangle, Princess P and Daddy painted it green on Daddy Date Night. A then later my oldest put some tissue fringe on it to complete it! This all cost about a $1. 
The kids loved hitting the piñata.... (note to self-when foretting eye cover use a gift bag... oh my goodness!!) I got some binoculars and a compass and put together a little bag of smores for the gift bags. We added the candy for the pinata that the kids scooped up too. Heading back to pick up area we hiked to the bridge to feed the ducks. I bought a big bag of bird seed and filled up cups for each of the kids. The ducks went CRAZY for this. Finally, we let the kids play in the dinosaur dig area. It's a big covered sand area with some dinosaur bones barried that the kids can uncover or discover! 
The kids loved it! Here are some snapshots of our night too. Yummy smores and all
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