Well, it's official. Paige is 7. Kids grow so fast, where did the time go? I feel like just yesterday she started preschool, and now she is a big 2nd grader. I am trying so hard to cherish the moments with Aubrey that seem to have flown by with Paige.
We had a great birthday party for Paige. We had a backyard Carnival Birthday Party! It was so much fun and the kids seemed to have a great time. Paige even said that it was the best birthday EVER! I am very proud of all the work I put into it. I can't take credit for all the ideas, I did a lot of searches on google for ideas, but a lot of places didn't have pictures, so it was hard to imagine. So I wanted to post some to help those who want to throw a Carnival Themed Party.
Games
I wanted to do tons of games, but my husband made me feel like I was doing TOO MUCH! Maybe he was right, but she only turns 7 once right LOL Well I did 6 booths: Bottle Blast, Rainbow Rings, No Chop Drop, Paparazzi, Lucky Ducky and PF Ink. For all the booths I hung colorful table cloths from a clothing line with clothes pins, this was a cheap alternative to building booths, and it was very easy to do.I found my table cloths from Wal-mart on clearance for $4 a sheet, if you already have sheets you can work with at home then it's at no cost to you.
All the signs were made from that foam paper. This was a perfect way to get the birthday girl involved too. I gave her the stencils and had her make the signs. She had so much fun decorating them. Words of wisdom though, if you do use the foam stuff like me, after you color with a marker go over with glitter glue. The marker will rub off if you do not.
Bottle Blast
For bottle blast I took clear beer bottles and painted them all different colors then hot glued them onto a 2x4 that I had spray painted. I then placed a ping pong ball on top and gave the kids a water gun to shoot off the ball.
Rainbow Rings
For Rainbow Rings, aka Ring Toss, I did something similar to bottle blast. I hot glued the bottles down onto a spray painted piece of plywood. The kids had a lot of fun with this one. I couldn't find "rings" so I just used bracelets that I found at Walmart. They were like kids bangles or something. I liked using the beer bottles again so that it had a "clink" when the ring hit the bottles, guess it's about preference.
No Chop Drop
The object of this game is to move the marble from one bowl to the other with only using chop sticks. It's a lot harder than it looks. The kids got a real kick out of this one.
Lucky Ducky
For us this was kind of a pointless game. I had misplaced the tickets, and had more kids than expected, so the ticket idea wouldn't have worked anyway. Well I still set it out and Little Miss Aubrey used it as her game for the day slashing in the water. What the game was supposed to be about was each duck had a number on the bottom, and which ever number you got was the amount of tickets that you get. There were about 12 ducks with a little bit of water so they floated. There were 2 ducks with 3 on the bottom, 4 ducks with 2 on the bottom, and the rest were 1.
PF Ink
As you can tell this was the place to be LOL. It's the one pictured on the right with the umbrella. Basically "PF" are Paige's initials and we named the Booth PF Ink like "LA Ink". It was a temporary tattoo booth, we were going to have face painting, but we had to switch the day and my friend couldn't do them anymore :( OTC has lots of temp tattoos for cheap!!
Paparazzi
This was perfect as well!! I have tons of pictures of Paige and her friends sticking their head through this photo cut out, and all the parents thought it was hilarious. No Carnival is complete without it!!
Food
Good thing about food you are not limited on the possibilities. For us I just did hot dogs, hamburgs, and chips. And lots of goodies. Yummmm check out these...
I also did bags of popcorn that the kids took home with them.
And instead of a cake I did these....
I had 4 of them with 8 total on each one. They are supposed to look like balloons. They were perfect for outside because once Paige blew out the candles I could just grab each tray and pass them out. The ribbons were hot glued to a piece of cardboard that was covered in blue wrapping paper to give it an effect that they were flying. I then curled the ribbons just to give them an extra cute look. Now the cupcakes themselves, look how yummy they look...
I got this idea from one of my favorite blogs for recipes...
http://mealplanningmommies.blogspot.com/2010/05/rainbow-cupcakes.html
I think that just about covered my Carnival Party. For prizes, to make it fair for everyone, I was going to have all the kids collect tickets, but instead of actually getting prizes for the amount of tickets they got, everyone got the same thing, a goody bag full of toys. This was the only way I could find that it would be fair for all the little kids and big kids, and it wouldn't cost me an arm and a leg.
