Party Ideas: Beach Party for Kids ("Life's a Beach!")
My daughter turned four a few days ago. As I’m sure everyone can agree, COVID-19 came at an inopportune time. We hadn’t seen most of our New Jersey family and friends in at least nine months, and we didn’t feel comfortable having 30+ of them hanging out at my parents’ house in Massachusetts for the afternoon. That said, we also wanted to make my daughter’s birthday special, which created a bit of a challenge.
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After much thought, we finally settled on creating a “Jersey Shore”-themed birthday beach party (hold the jokes – we are not Snooki and JWoww over here…) that would incorporate many of her favorite memories (with many of her favorite people) in a way that was both fun for her and safe for everyone else.
STEP ONE (OPTIONAL): MAKE A “GROUP” GIFT
It’s no secret that making personalized gifts is both time-consuming and stress-inducing, but their finished product can last a lifetime and make the recipient really, REALLY happy every time they think about it. In our case, the closest thing to having her family and friends physically there in person was to have them each create a short video for B on their smartphones, which we showed to her on the day of her party. Unlike the first time I made a video for my nephew seven years ago, this second attempt went much smoother thanks to texting and people just generally being a lot more familiar with how to take videos of themselves (unless you’re my parents, in which case you need a lot of help).
We asked everyone to record a short video message of themselves wishing B a happy birthday, and then pieced them all together using Adobe Premiere (which is, quite possibly, the most wonderful software on the face of the earth). While it was just as painful to get people to actually complete theirs as I expected, I was able to pull everything together in under two hours, which really wasn’t bad at all.
STEP TWO: PLAN ACTIVITIES
Since we didn’t have to worry about placating multiple kids at our beach party, we were able to design our games around what we thought our daughter would like most. Beyond sand and water, the third thing that immediately comes to mind when we thought of the Jersey Shore was the boardwalk, and, by extension, boardwalk games. We settled on five super-simple ones that truly can be created in a few hours, and since we didn’t have anyone else to worry about, I didn’t mind using a similar concept to what we had done for last year’s county-fair party either.
Beach Party Game #1: Ball Drop
This required a tiny bit of foresight because it required us to save jars a couple months in advance. In our case, we happened to have five espresso cans and two Talenti ice cream containers lying around (Lysol/Clorox wipes containers would work too), so we used those, but the important thing is that you have two different sets of objects that are of differing sizes. First, find a large Amazon box and cut off the top. Then, cut holes that line up with the top of your containers. Tape the containers to the box (it can be ugly because nobody will see that part). Paint the perimeters with two different colors of your choice, and assign point values to each color (see photo below). In our case, the smaller (red) Talenti containers were worth 5 points and the larger (blue) espresso containers were worth 1 point each. Everyone throws three ping-pong balls, and the person with the highest points wins.
Beach Party Game #2: Beach Ball Toss
Find a small beach ball and any type of circular bowl. Tape the bottom and sides of the bowl so that anything that comes even remotely close to it will attach. Make it a little harder by putting it on top of a water table if you have one. Have everyone attempt to throw the beach ball into the bowl once, with the older folks standing progressively farther away than the younger ones. Everyone who succeeds gets 5 points.
Beach Party Game #3: Sand Search
We already owned a sand box, so I literally just found six random items from my basement that looked like they might be of interest to B (pens, pencils, some Play-Doh cans) and had her “hunt” for them. Believe it or not, this activity should have taken the least amount of time and it took by far the longest, possibly because it was one of our last ones and we were getting tired and hot (see photo below). If you were working off a points system like the above, you could make things a lot harder (but more interesting) by instead hiding pieces of paper with point values written all over them.
Beach Party Game #4: Pin the Kohr’s
Anyone from Jersey knows the name Kohr’s, but if you’ve been deprived, it’s simply the most amazing soft-serve ice cream on the planet. We ended up finding some pictures of ice cream cones online and just blew them up and cut out enough of them to accommodate the five of us. It certainly wasn’t a work of art, but it was functional. The person who came closest to the cone got 5 points, second-closest got 3 and third-closest got 1.
Beach Party Game #5: Dart Balloons
This game really only works if you’re confident that everyone participating won’t stab themselves – or someone else – in the eye because darts are SHARP! I bought this incredibly cool set on Amazon, fully expecting it to be a piece of garbage for how cheap it was. Much to my surprise, it turned out to be awesome. We used an old bulletin board and taped a bunch of balloons to it, then had my daughter throw five darts to see how many she could break. Every burst balloon was worth 1 point.
THE PINATA
Unlike last year – where it practically took a sledgehammer to open our Ferris wheel pinata – I opted to make a super-easy sand castle-themed one out of old boxes. For full details, click here (link coming soon!), but suffice it to say that it made the birthday girl very happy, which was the whole purpose.
STEP THREE: FOOD
We don’t walk with the rest of the ducks in this household, so if someone were to ask my daughter what her favorite food was, her first answer would probably be, “a bone.” Yes, one of the few areas where she appears to take after me happens to be in the meat-lover’s category, which is probably not great for her future health but which makes me very, very proud at this moment in time. Since one of her favorite meals was at Black’s BBQ in Lockhart, Texas, we thought it would be nice if we ordered her one of the humongous beef rib bones that she had absolutely inhaled the last time we were out there. (Fast-forward to the actual day and she wanted nothing to do with this bone, so my husband and I were FORCED to eat her portion of the insanely expensive food we had just ordered explicitly for her – but such is life.)
For drinks, we made some lemonade and used that inside portion of most beverage dispensers to fill with water and blue food coloring so it looked “ocean-ish.” I stuck one of her Finding Nemo bath toys in there to make it look like a fish was swimming, but it didn’t really come out that great, though I did like the idea in principle.
For dessert, I had gotten one of those Wilton 3D Cake Ball Molds from Amazon with the intention of making a beach ball cake, which turned out to be super flimsy and made of aluminum (so hand-wash only – annoying) but got the job done. Since we’re allergic to eggs, I found an egg-free chocolate cake recipe online and iced the outside with whipped cream that I separately colored with a bunch of different food dyes. I know absolutely nothing about icing cakes or I would have figured out that maybe the tip I used shouldn’t have been so… frilly… but I seemed to be the only person who really minded that it wasn’t exactly beach ball-y and was instead more of… something… else… On the outside, I added a couple seashells I had collected on our last beach trip, along with some of those horrendous paper shavings that come in almost every art kit you buy that you have absolutely no use for except to fall all over your floor (PSA: apparently colored paper leeches out its color onto whatever plate you put it on, so while it’s fairly easy to clean, just keep that in mind because I wasn’t expecting that). My aunt had gotten us this Lotus Candle, which opens up on its own, plays the birthday song and is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen – highly recommended for something different.
STEP FOUR: RELAX
While I definitely missed having our family and friends at the party, I must admit that this was the easiest party-planning I’ve ever done, likely because there were only a handful of potential critics. The birthday girl was exhausted at the end of the (again sunny and unseasonably warm) day, but seemed to have a really nice time, and at least we successfully managed to make what I hope will be our first and LAST quarantined birthday party a pleasant memory for her.