Guest Author - Kristi Larson

Anyone who knows me knows that I am all about going overboard with parties. I have high expectations of what a party should be, and I try to exceed those expectations. I also believe that parties for children should celebrate being a child! This resulted in the "Undersea Adventure!"

For my son’s first birthday, we opted for an “Undersea Adventure” theme. I went with purchased fish invitations, covered all of my windows with blue cellophane, hung green streamers from the ceiling for seaweed, and inflated 25 giant fish shaped balloons at their eye level.

Now for the "over the top" - I cleared out all of our living room furniture and put down tarps. Then I brought in two pools and filled one with sand and one with water, and requested that the parents accompany their children. For any toddler party this is a must, unless you only invite one or two. Everyone played for hours at the indoor beach, with digging and sifting toys in the sand, and sponges, cups, and floating bathtub toys in the pool. Some children, okay all, ate a little sand. Yes, I could have done this outside, but then I would have had to worry about sun, bugs, rain...

We served blue jello from a fishbowl that also had gummy fish "floating" in it".
Each child then got to take home one of the giant balloons. With the tarps down, cleanup was a breeze and the only problem was that none of the children wanted to leave! For me, that's always the sign of a great party!