Birthday at Sulphur Creek Nature Center

Last Saturday we threw our 3 year old a birthday party at Sulphur Creek Nature Center. It was great, we couldn’t have chosen a better place to have a birthday party.
Sulphur Creek Nature Center is a wildlife education and rehabilitation facility nested in the middle of Hayward’s suburban sprawl. It seems almost miraculous that such a slice of nature, complete with its tall trees, singing birds and humming critters, can appear so suddenly after blocks and blocks of houses. The park is pretty small, but large enough for 3 yo’s to run around. They have cages with rescued animals, lots of birds (even a huge golden eage) and a couple of coyotes. The children LOVED looking at them.
The nature center building includes an exhibit hall, with aquariums/terrariums with life fish and lizards, and a birthday room/classroom in the back. Birthday parties ($120-160) include a one hour presentation plus 3 hours use of the birthday room. In summer/nice days you can have the party outside on the picnic tables, but it was rainy the day we had the party so having the birthday room was great.
The presentation is carried out by Christine, a wonderful docent that knows both how to entertain and how to control raucous little children. It includes an introduction to two animals, a puppet show and a craft. You get to chose the animals from a long list of small mamals, snakes and a couple of others. We chose a chinchilla, as we figured it’d be a treat for everyone to pet this, the softest animal on the planet, and a duck, as I figured kids often get to chase ducks but practically never touch them.
I was extremely happy with the way all of it went. The puppet show was first, and about half the kids paid attention half the time – not bad for a bunch of 3 yo’s who were mostly interested in chasing each other. Then they got to see the animals, they had to seat on pieces of carpet as the docent talked about the animals and had everyone pet them (twice!). They also got to feed them – a seed in the case of the chinchilla, a worm in the case of the duck – either out of their hand or out of a plate, that was great as some of the little kids were reluctant to get the animals so close to their hands. Kids also got to see the chinchilla take a “bath” in extremely soft ashes – and got to feel these ashes. The kids also made a circle around a sheet that was placed on the floor for the ducks to walk around, as they quacked and pooped. They all LOVED it. Hey, we adults loved it too!
After that the kids were taken to the birthday room for a craft. They seemed less interested in this.
The birthday room includes two long tables – one tall for the adults and a short one for the kids. It’s a classroom so the room it’s pretty crowded, but there is some counter space, a sink and you can refrigerate/freeze a couple of small things (the refrigerator/freezers are mostly filled with the staff’s stuff). The room is mostly a classroom so it doesn’t have any birthday decorations and there isn’t any room for them, though we managed to hang a Happy Birthday sign over the wall. There wasn’t a place to hang our pinata, so Mike held it while the children pulled the strings. We had about 7 children and 10 adults and the room was pretty much at capacity – you can have up to 20 children, but that would be too many for the room. About half the people we invited came, however.
In all, the birthday party went great and I will probably hold another one for one my daughters at Sulphur Creek in the future.