Carnival Party!

I love to plan a party. And this one was fun to plan. There are so many great ideas on Pintrest and I used them!

My girls turned eight this month! Which is really hard to believe, they were just four like yesterday!  I gave them some ideas for birthday parties, Frozen, Dr. Seuss or a carnival party. I was hoping for the carnival party or Dr. Seuss, oh the places I could go with that...but they decided they wanted a carnival party. So the planning began.

I planned six games. There was the balloon burst, ring toss, lollipop pull, spray away, ping pong toss and knock down the cans game. I also had two quart size mason jars that had jelly beans and gum balls in them and everyone got to guess how many and the winner got the jar of goodies. I put clown noses in a clear glass vase, like a hurricane, and taped a clown what is different game to it and they all got to wear clown noses, that was cute. The kids were really having a great time. I ordered tickets to hand out as they played the games to get their "prizes." The prizes were dollar store items in little zip lock bags. I took a box that I had and put the wrong side of wrapping paper around the box, it was Christmas paper if you were wondering why I used it wrong sided. Then I took clothes pins and a dab of gorilla glue and attached them to the box and hung the prizes from them. You can kinda see it in the photo below between the garage doors. Those are the birthday girls in the photo.

balloon burst

 I did a photo booth with all kinds of different props. My favorite prop was the strong man dumb bell. Which unfortunately one side was popped by my blonde haired child at her first attempt to play balloon burst. My fault for having it so close. She still got tickets. To make the dumb bell I took an empty wrapping paper roll and two balloons, taped the balloons to the wrapping paper roll and spray painted it black. Cute huh?

There was also a concession stand, with bags of popcorn, whole pickles, cracker jacks, animal crackers and cotton candy. The kids got to "spend" their tickets on whatever they wanted.

The photo above was the center piece for the girls table. The wind kept blowing and knocking down the cracker jack boxes. Speaking of wind, everyone was having a great time and the winds started to really blow and then the rain came. It's monsoon season here in New Mexico and I thought it would be a great idea to have an outside party.....We were doing photo booth pictures and the wind started getting bad, as you can see..My poor photo booth. It got way worse but I won't post those pictures.

We had to pack it up and head inside in a hurry. I think I was more bummed than the kids because I had so much work put into it. This mama was tired!!! But they are so worth the work! We did get this shot of our family before the wind got bad.

The girls really are twins. They just look nothing alike! I love when people ask me questions like whats the age difference between them? And I get to say 2 minutes and then get a puzzled look form them. We started attending a new church so I have been getting those questions a lot lately.

We went inside and had corn dogs and little bags of chips. Then it was cake time and then they opened presents. I did cupcakes just because its easier to serve that way. I didn't serve ice cream this time and since it got moved inside I am kinda glad I didn't, last year I did and I portioned it out in muffin wrappers the night before and covered them with plastic wrap so when it was time for cake and ice cream you just put it on the plate with the cupcake and voila. So easy.

Even though our carnival party got rained out it was still a good time. One of the girls told me this was the best day of their life. Love that.

Jen