A couple of months ago, my three year old threw me for a loop by requesting a unicorn birthday party. He’d seen a Party City ad on Disney Jr., and he wanted that. Once I saw the ad and traced the source of his newfound interest in unicorns, I had to bring him back down to earth a little. I don’t have the capabilities (or budget, tbh) to build a unicorn out of balloons or have a balloon arch. He was fine with that, but he still wanted unicorns.
Fast forward a few weeks, and he’s added rainbows to the birthday theme. This boy has been obsessed with rainbows for about a year, and he’s just all about the rainbows. So now he wanted a theme that he invented and doesn’t actually exist anywhere.
Thankfully, unicorns and rainbows go hand in hand. We’re pretty low key party wise, just a few friends, family, a variety of delicious food, and a massive Costco cake. Here’s what we came up with to satisfy my now four year old boy. (We adults may know that unicorns and rainbows are marketed to little girls way more than little boys. But my boy loves them, so that’s what we did. He doesn’t know it’s “meant” for girls, and I honestly don’t really believe in all that “meant” for nonsense. They’re kids. They can all like whatever the heck they want.)
These are two of my favorite birthday party traditions. With each kid, from age 1, we’ve done this. We love looking at the photos, and the birthday survey is such a fun memento. I keep them all, and plan on arranging them in a photo album at some point. It’s fun and interesting to see how their likes and interests have changed.
Food
We’re a family of foodies, if foodies are people who just love food! So party food is a special treat, and we (ahem, me, it’s mostly me) like to come up with fun puns for the food. As a result, my kids still call cheese balls “fire balls” from the Mario themed party they had last year!
The cheese balls were dubbed “Rainbow Drops” while the Bugles were called “Unicorn Horns.” Finding conical shaped foods to call unicorn something or others wasn’t the easiest task, especially since I try to not sugar up the kids too much before feeding them cake. There were tons of candy, cakes, and pudding unicorn ideas on Pinterest, but the sugar high from cake seems like enough for us. You can find my Pinterest board for this party (any many others) here.
We made rainbow pasta and named it “Unicorn Bow Ties”. You cook pasta as usual, then put it in a bowl that has food coloring and water. Let the noodles soak, then remove. The purple and green turned out great, but the yellow was a poor color choice in hindsight! It just didn’t show up.
The fruit and veggie rainbows were named “Double Rainbow in the sky, fruits and veggies my oh my!”
Fruit rainbow included:
Strawberries, clementines, pineapple, kiwi, blueberries, purple grapes. We made fruit dip out of cool whip and rainbow sprinkles. Simple + easy = winning!
Veggie Rainbow included:
Tomatoes, carrots, yellow tomatoes, cucumber, cabbage (for purple…there was no blue veggie because I don’t think those exist?). I put ranch dressing in a ramekin for dipping.
Costco made this gorgeous cake, and we added the 4 candle. It was DELICIOUS. If you haven’t had a Costco cake, you’re missing out.
Decor
Our decor was streamers in rainbow colors, a few hanging unicorns that I found at Dollar tree, and the tablecloth for the food. Apparently I failed to get any photos of the decor! These are the plates and napkins we chose from Target:
Birthday boy himself picked out the plates from the selection on Target.com. He loved the blue background with the unicorn, and especially that it had rainbow hair. When it came in the mail, he literally hugged the plates he was so excited. It was a great mom moment, because I was able to help make it happen. Thanks, Target. We love you.
Treat/Goody Bags
We got these cute paper treat bags from Target. We included a coloring sheet with a custom thank you note, unicorn temporary tattoos, unicorn lollipops, a unicorn notebook, unicorn erasers, and a unicorn party blow thingy. The erasers, notebooks, and blowers were from Target. The tattoos and lollipops were passed along by a friend who also recently hosted a unicorn party, and I believe they were from Hobby Lobby and Oriental Trading.
Here are the printable versions of our food labels and coloring sheet. We don’t have a color printer, so I chose things in black and white, silhouette, or things I could color (or have the kids color!).
Here are the printables for:
Rainbow Unicorn Coloring Sheet
What are your favorite birthday party themes?
Paw Prints in the Sink 