(Ant)Arctic Party Planning: Pt 1

When we originally sat down to plan C's Awesome (Ant)Arctic Party, the big question was: what are we going to do with 5 kids? (Our two plus three friends.) I wanted an activity that featured each of the three major animals of the party: Walrus, Polar Beat and Penguin.

During the extensive party prep stage, I found this Arctic Explorer Birthday Party and they had taken a honey bear and painted it for a decoration. Well all the light bulbs went off and I decided right then and there that I was going to make a bunch of them and do Polar Bear Bowling.

In my head I thought we were destined to buy a lot of honey. I was trying to figure out what we were going to do with all the honey because I wasn't going to waste it but where would I keep it? A moot point. After a long discussion, Husband said, "Why don't we just buy empty honey bears?"

Why not indeed? That option wasn't even on my radar but one quick Google search brought me to THESE 8oz Honey Bears. The size bear you would buy in the store is 12oz but I figured it didn't really matter if they were a little smaller. And the price was right. $5.40 for 10 empty bears. They do not come with closures but I didn't need them for my project. I should note here that I did need one closure to paint the bears, but I finished the honey we had anyway and washed that closure for this project.

They came super fast. C LOVED them.  He was so excited!

One night after kid's bedtime I laid out some paper and sat down to work on painting the bears white. Since we did our living room we had some white primer already so I went down the basement and got that.

I took a bear, put about two teaspoons of primer in, put the lid on and shook it all about. It took a lot of effort to coat the whole thing with some vigorous shaking. When the bear was fully coated I held it upside down over the paint bucket. Then on a paper towel for a while to get the excess paint out, for the amount of shaking required I was shocked at how much paint came out in this process. I stood it up right side up to dry and repeated this until they were all white on the inside.

Painting the inside made it so that you could use the black eyes and nose that already come on honey bears, but you could easily spray paint them if you didn't care about keeping the faces.

That is how I made Polar Bear Bowling. Total cost: $5.40 + shipping. A little more if you need to buy paint and closures.

I set up the bowling on our coffee table with a plastic table cloth on top. We used foam baseballs as the bowling "ice" balls. It was a huge success! Perfect for our (Ant)Arctic Party! The actual play of the game was a little harder than I anticipated. But they had fun so it was all good! And the polar bears looked wonderful!

We also had the arctic water table full of blue water beads. We put some of C's Toob animals in, both arctic and penguins and everyone seemed to enjoy that. I love water beads in a sensory table. Hours of fun to be had!

One of our more physical activities was the indoor snowball fight. I just bought a big bag of 200 cotton balls for less than $2, dumped them into a bucket and put it in the middle of the room. And I am telling you it was SO. MUCH. FUN. I really think all ages would enjoy this activity. But buy some more cotton balls if you have more people, 200 was the perfect amount for two adults and five kids 4 and under.

They just ran and jumped, hooted and hollered and it was great. Cotton balls didn't hurt anyone or damage anything. They did leave little cotton strands on my blue carpet but that's nothing a vacuum can't handle! I cannot stress how much fun this would be at a family Christmas or school party.

I will be back tomorrow with more of the activities of the (Ant)Arctic Party.