Sea Party

Sophie has been waking up early ever since the middle of spring. We don't mind too much, because she's pretty quiet about it, reading books or coloring in. In the second last week of school, she woke up one Wednesday morning and started drawing sea creatures on the colored paper. She then informed me that they were to be cut out for the Sea Party she was planning.

I told her that was a nice idea, and got on with life. But the next morning it happened again. And she started talking about a Sea Party with her friends. Then on the Friday, she was still going on about it. She had plans for games and ideas for name tags and a very specific condition that the guests had to bring a sea toy, or they would not be granted admittance.

So I asked her who she planned to invite. She listed Mia, Hugo and her friend Oliver from school. That's fairly easy really. And we did have Saturday morning free. So I told her that if she asked her friends parents and if they were free, they could come to the Sea Party. Then we came home from school and planned the Sea Party.

Invite list, game plan, food prep. Pretty straight forwards. Sophie was totally in charge of the decorating. And came up with the games to play on her own too. I kept food simple, and had watermelon cut with star shapes (star fish!) which actually, the girls did themselves. As well as a batch of cupcakes and packs of seaweed.

The girls got out their sea creature toys to have options available. Sophie put "name tags" (cut out sea creatures) on each guest as they arrived. You can see Rachel's in the above photo.

Here is our Sea Party organizer with her shark.

We used the big table on the deck, and Sophie hung her cut out sea creatures there. I added the white table clothes to make it feel more cubby like. It was pretty cool under there.

They played a game of "Throw and Catch" which was essentially, throw the sea creature toy in the air, and catch it when it came down. If you drop it you're out. I also put on music to see how they went stopping spontaneously when the music stopped. We played a few rounds and everyone got a lolly prize at the end.

Then was the sea mural craft activity. The girls and I painted the background Friday night and the kids got to glue sea creature shapes on to make a mural.

And lastly, an activity that Sophie did not plan, but I just happened to have in the freezer thanks to one of my day care kids asking for ice earlier in the week. I had frozen a bunch of green gems in containers in the freezer with layers of water and water mixed with food coloring. I tipped out the containers into the big tub and the kids had to melt the ice to get the gems out. Took a while, was nice and cool and very fun.

I was talking with Sophie on the Saturday morning about how lucky she was to be having a spontaneous Sea Party. She was so excited on the Friday night it took her ages to fall asleep, and she was up at about 4:30 on Saturday morning from that same excitement. Even with the sleep deprivation, we managed to pull off a fun event with minimal tears. It gives me great hope for future birthday parties. Can she run her own next year?