Maia's Wild Birthday

Maia had a Wild birthday!!!  All my kids love watching the Kratt brothers.  We started with Zoboomafoo, a show starring a lemur and Chris and Martin Kratt in Animal Junction.  They get to meet all different kinds of animals and learn about them!  It fit right in with their love of Diego in Go, Diego, Go.  After we went to see Wild Kratt’s live, we started watching the show Wild Kratts, which is a mostly animated version of the show.  Chris and Martin get creature power suits made by an awesome engineer named Aviva.  They get the powers of various animals, so they can more easily learn about them and help protect the animals.  They all LOVE seeing all the cute animals in this show, and when Maia asked for a Wild Kratt’s birthday I finally got to plan the Wild Animal party I’d been wanting to do for years, but waited until Maia was old enough to have fun with it too!

Maia got the new Aviva creature power suit so now we have three! And I made them for everyone else too =)

When the Wild Kratt’s use their creature power suits, the creatures they turn into are the colors of the suit. So I made a green tiger for DZ, a blue Red Panda for Serenity (which she traded for the elk when she saw the blue deer), and a purple nightingale for the birthday girl! She wore it the whole party!

These were so much fun and easy to make! The power suits are just black fleece with a little velcro and sticky felt for the decorations. I bought the set of power disks so I made felt masks to match them =)

Maia decorated all the gloves =)

I booked the people from Extreme Animals to come and bring animals right to our house!  They brought a Fennec fox, a turtle, a chinchilla, a baby cayman, a blue tongued skink, a bearded dragon, a lemur, a baby serval cat, and a kangaroo!  It was AMAZING!!!  I absolutely loved getting to see these animals up close, touch or even hold them, and learn all about them!  Maia was enthralled!  She kept raising her hand to chime in with all these neat animal facts she’d learned about animals from her various animal shows and games.  It was perfect!! 

I LOVE that she kept raising her hands and adding all the facts she’s learned about animals from all the animal shows she loves =) It was so awesome to hear her so excited and engaged!

The Fennec Fox was named Radar.  He had gigantic ears so he had great hearing and they help cool him off.  Maia knew he was a desert creature.  She says he was soooffffft =) 

The animals were a complete surprise! Maia was THRILLED! She’s saying “Awwwww” when she first saw that there was a real Fennec Fox at her party =) I love this expression Neisha caught!

The chinchilla was named Jasmine and she was even softer!  She is endangered, but she does well with people so her species will survive. 

She brought several adorable reptiles! Don’t ask me why, but as long as they have feet I find them cute, but I specifically asked them not to bring snakes! ;) Maia loved them all! Smurf was the blue-tongued skink.  He licked Maia!!!  She liked it =)  Smurf is a reptile.  The bearded dragon was very scaly!  He was also a reptile and his chin is silky.  The cayman was named Lucifer.  He made several of the kids jump with his hissing!  He was ALSO a reptile.  Maia held him even though she hissed!  He tried to bite but he had a cuff on to keep his mouth closed. 

DZ loved the turtle…

…even after it peed on him!

Next was the lemur!  Our own Zoboomafoo!  Maia went and got her brand new stuffed lemur that we got for the party and they looked just alike!  And her lemur liked to hold on to her just like Mowgli, the lemur friend that came to her party!  Mowgli had on a diaper and kept playing with it and shredding it.  Too funny.  The kids loved having Mowgli on their shoulder!  He played with Donovan’s hair.  =)  Maia got to feed him an animal cracker.  Another sweet soft animal friend!  Unfortunately lemurs are also endangered.  Madagascar isn’t a big place and a lot of their trees are getting cut down.  But they are great with people and in zoos also!

Next was Tuacan the serval cat.   He is just a baby cat.  Maia got to play with him!  She held his cat toy and he jumped like crazy for it! Soooo cute!  He was one of the few they didn’t get to hold, because his claws are sharp and he’s a baby so he’d try to climb them.  But they got to pet him anyway!!!  Soft too!  Soo neat!

The last animal was a Kangaroo named Aussie. Maia went to the car to get him and carried him in in a little pouch!  He was so snuggly!  He likes to be in the pouch because he’s still a baby, but his mama is starting to nudge him out of the pouch so the next baby can have his spot.  The presenter told us that Kangaroo moms have three babies all the time.  One nearly ready to leave the pouch, like Aussie, that still likes to visit the pouch but also climbs out to jump around and explore.  The other one is tiny, just about ready to come out into the pouch.  And the other one is inside waiting to be born!  That one can actually be frozen if there’s not enough rain or resources, and the mother’s body will tell it when it’s ok to be born.   Aussie got out of the pouch and hopped a little, but mostly he snuggled.  Even the adults got a turn to hold him.  Sooooo much fun!!!!!

I took some turns too =)

After the animals left, we had our favorite donuts from OK country donut store in fun animal shapes, and the kids ran around being Wild Kratts in their creature power suits!  I made everyone power suits from fleece and felt, and put a power disk in each suit with a felt mask to match it!  It was so much fun!  Maia chose to be a nightingale so she could have flying powers.  And it was purple to match her new Aviva power suit.  Donovan asked to be a green tiger, since he has Chris’s green suit, and Serenity was a blue deer.  They ran around like crazy!  So cute!!!  And all the power suits and masks went home with the kids. 

Serenity decorated the animal cracker cups =)

I nearly forgot!  Maia reminded me that she loved climbing in and out of the Tortuga!  The Tortuga is the Wild Kratt’s turtle ship, and we made one out of Crazy Forts!  I got new teal sheets that were just the right color, and covered the Crazy Fort so it looked just like the ship.  Maia loved it and she slept in it for several nights!  She filled it with books and pillows for a cozy nook. 

We made the tortuga out of Crazy Forts for the kids to play in =)

It was also a last hurrah for our jungle gym! We turned the game room into Animal Junction for the party. We filled the cushions under the jungle gym with every stuffed animal we own! The kids loved climbing around in their power suits and playing with the animals!

Maia got her stuffed lemur that she named Zoboomatwo after Zoboomafoo =)

Aunt Jen came! =)