Ideas please for 3rd birthday end of Oct outside!

[Welsummer]

My DD will be 3 the end of October and I would like to hold a small party of probably 7-8 children(aged 14 months - 3) plus parents but we have the tiniest house so we'd like to be outside....DH thought we could have a treasure hunt at the local park where our social club/cafe is.

Any thoughts on how to go about hunting for something given we feel children are not going to want to sit in the cafe chatting? DH thought laminating pictures of nursery rhyme characters and matching them with pictures on a card? Any other thoughts on food I could provide (the simpler the better), it will be a morning thing as club only open then and handy to have a place to come back to with coffee/toilets!

MNers...get your creative hats on please!

Thank you in advance for all ideas.

[dogonpoints]

An overwhelming response from the creative hats of mn .

Couldn't you just do a simple autumn treaure hunt for items of a list eg conker, leaf, acorn, erm, feather. Winner gets a little prize, everyone else gets a sweetie.

I like combining end of October birthdays with hallowe'en so I'd go for friendly ghost biscuits and spider web cakes and witches' fingers (chicken goujons) etc.

[liliputlady]

My dd went to an outdoor party in the woods a few years ago. I remember thinking the treasure hunt was ingenious as it required virtually no preparation. The birthday girl's mum said something along the lines of - "the rainbow fairy has visited the wood this morning and left things in all colours of the rainbow". Children had to go off hunting for natural things in different colours. I think they may have had a blank card with double-sided sticky tape to stick them on.

Hot food would be warming - bacon butties maybe?