Josiah’s Trash Truck Birthday Party (plus FREE PRINTABLE!)
If your little one is obsessed with trash, here are some trash truck birthday party ideas for you on the cheap, plus a free printable for little party favors!
LIFE + FAMILY
Josiah’s 4th Birthday Party Fit For A (Trash Truck) King
Kids love what they love, amirite?
It feels like yesterday when I was planning his Biggie Smalls themed 1st birthday party and now we have a VERY active, Toy Story loving, trash truck OBSESSED 4 year old.
This party was super easy to throw together and came off as a hit to the birthday boy and now I’m sharing the joy with you fine people!
Trash Truck Party Decor Ideas
This post may contain affiliate links which help me pay for things like web hosting, site security, email services and bottles of wine from Aldi when the aforementioned things aren’t working. They cost nothing for you, but help me continue to provide free content to you fine, beautiful people!
We bought 3 of these galvanized trash cans from Lowes and used this one for our chips.
This party was at a park instead of our house and so we wanted to make things easy for kids to grab and eat.
I can’t believe I didn’t get a picture, but the other 2 we had set up for kids to throw bean bags in to like a mini cornhole type game. It was super cute!
I happened to come across this really cute trash bash banner and bought the digital version and had it printed at my local Office Depot. I was super pleased with this!
We added zip ties to the grommets and attached it to the table at the park.
Seriously that was it for decor. We were at a park with 4-5 year old kids. They weren’t going to be super interested in the decor anyway.
We had some colorful construction vests for the kiddos to wear and little yellow hats, but those hats were hard to stay on because it was super windy and they were very lightweight.
He already had the Matchbox trash truck that he got for Christmas a year ago and we just stuck that on a table for decoration.
When you have a kid obsessed with trash trucks, you’re liable to have some laying around and that we did.
Food
Aside from chips, we had pizza from Little Caesars, or as Kevin from The Office referred to a certain brand of pizza, “Hot circles of garbage.”
Pizza, chips, Capri Suns, waters. Donezo.
I’m telling you – easy peasy.
Charlotte was SO excited about getting to finally use her little pink camera that I got her right after Amazon Prime Day this year and have the title of my second shooter.
(Just a non-sponsored second to talk about this camera – I put off buying it for SO LONG, but this thing is really really great. She LOVES it! It takes surprisingly way better photos than I would have expected)
The Garbage Truck Cake
Jordan’s dad made the cake this year and it was so cute!
The trash truck is (*gasps*) one that we already had and then he used graham cracker crumbs for the dirt, and piped icing so that he could stick candy to the top to make it look like trash.
Also a HUGE hit with 4-5 year olds.
Candy you can use for “trash”:
- M&M’s
- Skittles
- Mike and Ikes
- Marshmallows
- Nerds
- Raisins (although you may get riots when children find out)
- Gummy worms
- Gummy bears
- Crushed Oreos
My second shooter was determined to get her shot of the cake as well.
We just baked an 8×10 vanilla sheet cake and then covered it in white icing, but you could easily do brown to make it look like dirt and nix the graham cracker crumbs if you wanted!
The Pièce de Résistance
There was a big reason why we didn’t have a lot of decor.
Through a contact of Jordan and his dad’s (who know just about everybody in this town somehow), we were able to get a trash truck to come for FREE for about 30 minutes and let the kids play around.
When Josiah saw this thing coming, he was BESIDE HIMSELF.
For some reason, when I said “give me a trash smile”, this is what I got.
Kids, man.
Josiah and his buddies got to go up in the truck, ask alllllll the questions and even got to pull the string for the horn. It was SUCH a huge hit. And free.
We definitely tipped the guy because he was so kind and so willing to entertain our kiddos.
We found Josiah’s personalized trash truck t-shirt on Etsy and it’s SO cute! He’s already worn it more than once or twice or thrice.
This little man is Josiah’s partner in crime and we love him to death. He’s always ready to pose for a photo and it’s awesome.
After deciding he wanted to stand on the front and take a picture, I was able to snap this one right before he slipped and got his hands allll up in some trash juice.
Yum.
Josiah was very concerned for the health and safety of our trash man so he went and grabbed some water and some chips for him to take with him on the road.
There wasn’t much more that could beat that, so we really didn’t try.
We used our trash can lids as a shield so that we could light his candles and blow them out.
We got a 4 and an exclamation point as candles because he’s not just 4, he’s 4!
Party Favors
These favors were SO cheap and so fun.
I’m not one for huge giant favors at birthday parties because I’m that mom who gets annoyed when I have to take home handfuls or basketfuls of crap so I try to not put that on any other moms if they’re like me.
I whipped these cards up in under 20 minutes and then added Oreos for the wheels of the garbage truck and inside I stuck “dirt” (aka. graham cracker crumbs) and a mixture of some of the same things that were on his birthday cake in addition to broken up pretzels.
I’m letting you have this as a free printable! Drop your email below so I can send you the super secret password and then you will be able to crack open the vault that leads to this printable and the rest of my printable library!
Trash Truck Gift Ideas
If you have a trash truck party coming up or you just have a trash truck loving kid of your own, here are some of our favorite gifts that we have or have been given and they’re AWESOME!
CLICK ANY IMAGE BELOW TO SHOP
Our absolute favorite toy is the ride on trash truck. It’s seriously SO COOL and I don’t say that lightly! It’s really fun and worth every penny.
We got him from Facebook Marketplace, but I would have paid full price for it for real. And I don’t pay full price for hardly anything.
We are so happy to celebrate our boy and so glad that he’s a part of our family forever and ever!
