Combined Birthday Party

My daughter just attended a combined party. On the invitation it only mentioned the birthday girl (my daughters friend) On the other birthday child's invitations that were sent to his friends it only mentioned him.

How can twins be one and five?

You could do a jungle theme. Just got the Oriental Trading catalog and they have some cute jungle theme balloons, masks, etc.

For family and shared friends, the invitations can reference all the kids. For invitees that is really being invited to one child's party it should only reference that child.

As for a theme, what about the Neverland Pirates? As in, Jake and the Neverland Pirates (which can also include Peter Pan and Tinker Bell). You could do a treasure hunt and the kids can pretend to be their favorite character from the show or any of the PP/TB stories.

I am confused about their ages as you said her son is going to be 2 but your girls are 1 & 5 but are twins.

we just did this ourselves and i put in the invites who the party was for and that no one was expected to bring a gift for everyone if anyone and that we would just love to have them come. each kid got to pick their own theme and we decorated a table for each child where the guests could place their individual gifts. we chose to make cakes from home and did 5 different flavors (the 5th was the babies that he dug into on his own). the only thing that didnt go to well was having to sit through 5 kids opening their gifts and 5 candle lightings and song. but you could decide to let everyone open at the same time or even two at a time. we bought one set of plates and cups and table cloth per theme for kids to use and a bunch of generic stuff for all of the adults to use. that saved money also.

How about having slightly different invites for guests who only know the 1YO would receive one that says "[Name of 1YO] invites you to...." and the guests who only know the 5YO would receive ones that say "[name of 5YO] invites you to ....." A family at our school did this when they combined their daughter and their (2 years younger) son's b-days and since the families like ours who only knew their daughter received invites that said "...to [daughter's name's] birthday", we didn't feel that we needed to bring a gift for their son as well. And you could always let families know that it's fine to just be bringing a gift for the child they know (I even stated this on my twins' b-day invites when they were in kindy and several of their friends only knew one but not the other b/c they were in separate classes)
have fun!

While you've probably already made up your mind I always had a shared party with my cousin (we are 10 days apart) I hated it. It made me feel like my birthday wasn't special. Everyone else got their own special day but us they even did a shared party for our sweet 16 and graduations :( I know you didn't ask all that but that's how I feel about combined parties.

Put only one child's name on the invite unless it's going to family. As for a theme well if you are doing a shared party why not just do something completely neutral so that no one feels left out. I like the Peter pan idea it has something for both the girls and boy.

My friend and I are having a joint birthday party for our kids, who are both turning 1. I have a girl; she has a boy. We are doing a jungle theme. We sent an evite to all our mutual friends and then separate paper invitations with just our own child's name to our individual friends.

I think you should send separate invites for each of the kids -- in other words, the kids will invite their friends only mentioning that it is their individual birthday. Then, there won't be any confusion.