Family Carnival

We recently spent 2 weeks in UT for some family reunions. The first family reunion was my family and the second was my hubby’s family. We had a blast, plus I got to go somewhere the sun shines and it’s warmer than 70 degrees. A BIG PLUS IN MY BOOK!!! Anyway I digress, onward and upward.  My extended family is pretty young; the oldest grandchild is only 9 (she happens to be mine, the next oldest happens to be mine also) When my mom & sister were trying to think of ways to entertain the kiddos, they came up with a great idea.  They decided to have a family carnival.  Each family was in charge of one of the carnival booths.  Since there are 6 kids + my parents in our family we had 7 different stations.  My parents were also in charge of the food.  They even got a snow cone machine AND a cotton candy machine.  It was a ton of fun, super easy and kept the kids really entertained. 

The booths we had were

• Fortune Teller/Kissing Booth (I’ll explain)
• Ring Toss
• Dunk Tank
• Whack-a-mole/ water squirt
• Picture taking (strongman, trapeze lady)
• Donuts on a string
• Knock down the bottles.

This little game you hook up to your hose and it sprays water at you as you jump on the little whack-a-mole guys.

Take your picture as a circus performer.

My sister did and awesome job with this one. The kissing booth was guessing how many Hershey’s kisses there were in different sized bottles.  BUT the fortune teller was by far my favorite, my sister dressed up and told peoples fortunes, she used one of those paper fortune teller things you use to make back in 3rd grade (remember those?). Every kids got to keep one as a souvenir from her booth.  Plus the fortunes were hilarious.

This wasn’t a true dunk tank, but it was still really wet and fun.  A person (mostly my husband) sat on the stool while other people got to throw wet sponges at them (him).

Ring toss.

I usually don’t share family pictures, but here are some from the carnival, some of them are my kids, some of them aren’t.

My parents also brought foot racers and stilts for the kids to play with.

We were coming from so many different states that our booths weren’t super elaborate or involved but you could really go all out, or just keep it simple like we did.  It was a great time. 

Sparkler Writing

During our family reunion, G&G brought sparklers for the kids to enjoy.  By what followed the next hour or so, I think the parents enjoyed them a little bit more. 

One person can make individual letters to spell out words. Like so…

These were made by my 9 year old daughter.  We are going to blow them up to 8 x10 and then frame them for her bedroom. 

 

Or you can get a group of people to form longer words or even pictures.  (I missed the picture phase of the evening, sorry)

I thought it would be cool to do our last name and blow it up to poster size and frame it really nicely for our den/office or something. (this isn’t quite our last name but you get the idea)

How did we do this? Well we used two different settings on our cameras.

Follow these simple steps

I used the fire work setting on my camera and the pictures were darker and you couldn’t see the people doing the writing as well.   Then everyone just makes the same letter, number or shape over and over again.  Super simple.

My brother and sister-in-law used a night setting on their individual cameras and you could see the people who were doing the writing. Like so

It was super fun, and really easy to follow. 

Who knew sparklers could be so cool.

Sunflower Playhouse

Wouldn’t this be so awesome to have in your backyard! Someday I will have one.  I found this at a local park last year and fell in love with the idea.  I wish I had room for one, I don’t but I thought I would share it with you incase some of you do.  I should have shared it sooner, but you still might have time to get one in this year depending on where you live.

It looks pretty easy.  They have 6 metal poles and some fencing that they have set up in a circle, leaving and opening for the door.  Then they planted a circle of sunflowers on the inside and the outside of the fencing.

Eventually the sunflowers enclose this little playhouse really nicely.  The sunflowers are really tall ones I would guess 6-8 feet.

Fast forward a few months and you have an awesome playhouse.  This is a view from the inside of the playhouse looking out.  I took these pictures last fall, I thought I had some from the outside but I can’t find them.

Hopefully you can get the idea of how cool this looks.  I'll go back in a few months and take more pictures.