I’ve mentioned before how we fell into this accidental tradition of throwing a themed carnival for our children’s 5th birthday parties. I genuinely love planning these parties (even with the stress that comes with it). Our third kiddo just turned five, and she decided she wanted a ‘glow in the dark’ theme. When I tell you I was pumped! I also love glow in the dark, and black light things, so I was so excited to put this party together. Not only that, but the ‘glow’ theme is still generic enough that it made it easy to plan the games and the prizes to go along with them.
Prizes and Decor
I used Amazon for nearly all of the decorations and prizes. I found some really cool UV reactive streamers, balloons, and decorations. We were really tight on our budget this go around, but if I could have I would have gone all out. With that said, Amazon really came in clutch with the items I bought and their prices. One prize I did splurge on was these inflatable gummy bears. They were adorable and I got them from a website called funcarnival.com. You can find those here: Inflatable Gummy Bears. It was my first time buying from that website but I will certainly be visiting them again! Our other prizes included LED light up foam sticks, light up bouncy balls, neon leis (these I just got at our local Zurchers), and party/slush cups filled with candy.
Games
The games for this party were fun and easy to scope out. Since we were headed into summer many stores have light up themed yard games for summer nights. Although I tend to like to hand make or DIY the games, honestly this saved some of my sanity by being able to have them ready to go. We did a light up corn hole game, light up bowling, and a game called Battle Buckets which had neon ping pong balls and small neon cups to throw them into. The only games that I had to fashion with my own hands was a glow ring toss (which was just some glow stick rings and a neon stick to toss them onto) and a target practice. The target practice I just took one of our XShot guns (like Nerf) and painted some neon paint on it, and painted the bullets as well. I then painted some white paints like targets and fixed them to cups to stand up on. This was actually the most popular game.
One thing we didn’t really go all out on is the displays because I wanted to put more into the prizes. My husband built a display of PVC pipe to hang all of the gummy bears on because they were large! He also built one to hang the leis on. For the other games, we just had display boards as the ‘booth’ if you will, and buckets that held the prizes.
And of course, the cake!
This might be one of my favorite parts! My daughter wanted a unicorn cake, and donuts. Getting donuts instead of making cupcakes saved me a bunch of time, and they turned out super cute! I found UV reactive edible food powder on Amazon. I debated on getting it for awhile because it was fairly expensive for four colors. After doing some research to see if regular neon food coloring would glow under blacklight and finding it would not, I finally decided to pull the trigger and get the powder. This stuff was worth every penny! It glows so well and a little goes a looooong way! It also does not have any taste so it didn’t affect the frosting at all. Check them out here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09B141MKB?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details
