Party.
There are a huge range of party options for kids in Melbourne.
Even if you live in rural and regional Victoria and are a long way from the big city of Melbourne, chances are you have a large number of choices if you look hard enough. However cost will become an issue if you live more than a few hours from the city.
Besides local providers, there are always entertainers who are happy to travel into the bush, even though they may charge you a little extra to do so to cover travel time and petrol and lost bookings arising from the rtime taken to do the travelling.
Many kids parties include such common fare as as a fairy, clown, super-hero, jumping castle, animal farm or a magician. But these days the choice is far wider and may include ten-pin bowling, vertical rock climibing, limo hire and other very different themes to add to a birthday party. A great choice for indoors or outside or summer or winter is a reptile party. The animals seem tolerant of most kinds of weather, except extreme hot or extreme cold and notwithstanding these variables, the handlers are aware of the limitations of their animals and can plan their visit as the weather4 dictates. When it is warm the animals may travel in ice-lined boxes or in containers covered with wet blankets to evaporatively cool them. On a cold day, they get transported in a heated car, sometimes with a near naked driver as the animals are cooked while in transit. If not moving at a a party of big event, the animals may come with undercage heating mats or cables.
But no matter how you look at it when planning, this is one concern that you, the party host, will not have to cope with. For normal reptile parties the duration is from 60 to 90 minutes, the main determinent being the average age of the kids.
For younger kids, the time frame is usually less as they simply don't have the attention psan of older kids. But one variable on this is that the adults at such a kids party may be more into the animals than the kids and 3end up spending ours handling the animals.
At a typical party, the usual script is for the reptile display to start soon after the kids arrive, before moving onto the food and the birthday cake, this usually being at the end of the party. There is a good reason why the cake is done at the end, and that is because the sugar tends to spark up the children and it is best for this unwanted chemical reaction to take place after the kids have gone home.
That way the dramas occur at someone else's place and not yours. All everyone remembers is your own party having a great show and nothing else.
As a word of advice, reptile shows and kids reptile parties are very popular and the people that do them are often flat out going from place to place and very heavily booked.
So the general rule is to make the booking before you tell your friends and send out the invitations. After all, there is nothing worse than having to tell people your event has to be moved due to the unavailablity of the entertainer.
Also it is worth noting that once you let friends know about the coming reptile show at your next birthday party, a lot will want to bring siblings and others, so expect a bigger than expected roll up of people. Yes, there will be a few people who may not want to go near the reptiles, or even come to the party. But these people are generally outweighed by those who can't get enough of them. Hence the general advice that a reptile party will tend to bring you a much bigger than normal crowd. Furthermore while a bite from a snake or other reptile is not common, what isn't is the animals defecating on people as they get handle.
There is a reason for this and that is because the movement makes them defecate and when they are not at a party being handled, they tend to sit around in their cages doing very little.
Of course for the reptile handler it is good that they defecate at the party, as that means one less cage to clean up at facility.