Savannah's Birthday Party

 We had Savannah's ocean-themed birthday party the third Saturday in January.  It's not uncommon for us to have the December birthday parties in January, since we're always too busy during the holidays.  It was planned to be at our home, but we moved it to the church gym at the last minute due to rain.  It turned out to be a good move, since we had a lot more space for the party.  

We set up a craft area on the stage where the girls painted treasure chests.  They got some sparkly marble magnets in their treasure chests.  

We set up a table on one end of the gym for lunch and cake.  I made the cake, with some fun shell chocolates and sour strips to look like corral.  The inside of the cake was a couple layers of blue.  I made homemade rolls, with red food coloring, for crab rolls. I used blue food coloring in the frog-eyed salad.  We also had blue jello with gummy ocean candy and whipped cream. I attempted to cut a watermelon to look like a shark.   We also had goldfish and some veggies.  All the food was pretty yummy!  

We had plenty of space to do some games in the gym.  They played with balloons.  We did crab walk, which Savannah won.  We did hot potato with a squishy toy that looked a little like a puffer fish.  Another game was a dolphin relay race, hurdling over mini waves.  We did a "save the sea turtle" race, digging baby sea turtles out of the paper "dirt" and racing them to the water.  They had to dig out all the sea turtles until each wave was filled on a poster board.  We also played a candy game - the same one we did with family over Christmas.  We brought all the candy and put them in bags. It didn't work as well this time, since they didn't want to trade very much.  They all took home some candy.  (No money in this game.)  Our last activity was a Lego building challenge, where they had 10 minutes to build an ocean-themed Lego creation.  

It turned out to be a fun party!  Twelve of her friends were able to make it, and everyone seemed to have a good time. It was lots of work to get everything ready and clean up though.