Organising a 5th birthday party can be a challenge, they tend to be past soft play and too
young for laser quest and the like. At age 5 new friendships are also being formed at school so its difficult to know who to invite and how to manage it. This is where Second Nature can provide the perfect solution for children’s parties, not least as you can invite up to 20 kids for a reasonable fee, so the whole class can get involved.
For my sons birthday this year, and at very short notice, Nicky Fish of Second Nature was able to help me put on an amazing party at only one weeks notice. I’d spent about 6 weeks researching what to do and couldn’t decide – the swimming party seemed logistically challenging, namely mustering enough parents willing to get wet, and his little brother had already had an awesome tipi party in the park through Try a Tipi so that option was out too.
The Second Nature party at Stanmer Park though was perfect. You meet your guests behind the house and once all assembled the kids head off with Nicky, with a trail of parents behind, into the woods whilst playing ‘hunt the caterpillars’ en route. When the kids arrive at the special opening amongst the trees, the camp fire is burning and there are a number of outdoor games, swings and activities for them to try. The kids were queuing up to have their faces daubed with camouflage and were mostly happy just to be in the great outdoors. We had the party on a school day after school in July so they were over-excited by the time they arrived but were able to run it off easily in a woodland setting.
You bring your own food for the event which can be a simple cold buffet or we chose to make sausages and jacket potatoes on the open fire. There is plenty of seating for parents on logs around the fire and our tasty meal for parents and kids alike was topped off with toasted marshmallows and birthday cake. Nicky from Second Nature lined up a whole host of games for the kids to keep them entertained which even included a homemade pinata and a gift for the birthday boy.
All of the kids loved it and I received lovely messages from all of the parents after the party including “what a most amazing party thank you so much for inviting us” “we will all be hard pressed to surpass this birthday party over the next year what a great idea”. I cannot recommend a bushcraft birthday party experience with Second Nature highly enough for both girls and boys alike and with the camp fire to keep you warm I should think it works perfectly weather permitting in the early winter and spring too.
My only tip to make the event go more smoothly would be to have a nominated person to collect latecomers to bring them back to camp. You can spend quite a bit of time running back and forth to navigate people to your location. Exciting as this can be, spending the whole of the party on a mobile phone trying to direct people via tree descriptions can be somewhat tricky!
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