Triple Pool Party

A couple Saturdays ago we had a joint birthday party for Kate, my niece, and my best friend's son.  They all three have birthdays within a couple weeks of each other (the other two kids are actually only one day apart - Kate is the outlier).  We decided to throw a joint birthday party now while they're young and still amenable to the idea (because they don't really know any better!).  When they're older, they will probably have a lot more opinions. ;)

The obvious choice of activity and location was a swim party at my parents' pool!  Easy and fun.  So we went with an aquatic theme.  All three of us had a little brainstorming session, and then divided up the preparation tasks.  I think it came together fantastically considering there were three different people independently preparing it!

My primary task was cupcakes:

I saw an idea on Pinterest for something similar to these that I modified slightly.  I made 72 cupcakes (2 dozen each of three different flavors of cake).  I frosted them blue and then used colored goldfish crackers.  The original source used white confetti sprinkles for the bubbles, but I had trouble finding the white without buying a whole bottle of multi-color and then having to sort out the 1/8 of them that were white.  I ended up liking the effect of the little white nonpareils as bubbles even more.  Then I just used a tube of the premade black frosting that I already had around from a previous project and a small round tip to dab on little eyes.

 

There was quite the spread thanks to both my best friend and my sister:

One of my favorite things we did were the snorkel juice boxes:

 

We were inspired by this, but we wanted juices and not soda.  There were crayons to write your name on and/or decorate your snorkel mask.  Credit to my sister for the fabulous execution on these.  She took off the straws and hot glued them back on just so.

We tried to have the food kind of follow the theme.  Goldfish crackers and chips with "dip":

Life savers and swedish fish:

For decorations we put up blue and green streamers to look like water/seaweed:

Then we put up various sea critter cutouts that my sister made all over the place:

Some were on fishing line to look kind of like they were floating/swimming:

For a little game/activity, we let the kids go "deep sea diving" for "sunken treasure" on the lawn area just off the deck.  My best friend bought Mardi Gras beads, gold coins, ring pops, and stickers for the kids to collect in goody bags.
 

 

I think the birthday girls and boy had a great time, so a definite success in my book!