A splashy party

I was looking for something fun and different for Biscuit's birthday party this year, and a friend at work made a good suggestion.

The Y near us has an indoor heated pool, and they rent it out for parties. So back in the early spring, I talked to Biscuit about it.

"How cool would it be to have a pool party in November?" I asked Biscuit.

"Mom!" Biscuit said, "we'd freeze to death if we had a pool party in November."

"Not if the pool is inside," I told him.

He liked the idea, so I told him that as soon as the stores starting putting out their summer stuff, we'd go ahead and buy plates and napkins and tablecloths and stuff for the goodie bags. He wanted to give everybody water guns and sunglasses in sand buckets that came with a little shovel. So we hit the dollar store and were pretty much done in June.

We looked for cake ideas online, but we didn't see any good "pool" cakes, so we decided to go with an ocean cake. We crushed up vanilla wafers for the sand and used blue icing for the ocean water. Then we added teddy bear crackers lying on fruit leather beach towels under umbrellas. And we put some bears in gummy floats in the water.

Here's what we came up with:

Then we decided on the snacks. We wanted the names to match the ocean themes, so we had Catch of the Day (aka assorted goldfish), cheeseballs (aka beach balls), rafts (aka crackers), sharks teeth (aka cheddar cheese) and tourists (aka the bears that didn't make it onto the beach or in the water).

Biscuit wanted a number candle and some other assorted ones. He suggested that we put all the blue candles in the water and the others on the "beach" like tiki torches.

Biscuit did get a war wound. Once the kids got their goodie buckets, they took out their sunglasses and water guns and started running around pretending to shoot each other. Biscuit stopped, but the kid behind him didn't, so Biscuit got a nice big scratch down the back of his neck. He cried for a little bit, but it didn't take long for him to be over it and go right back to playing.

When I signed up for the party, the aquatics director said the pool would be open to all the members. But all we saw was a couple of other people who came in at different times while the kids were swimming. They almost had the pool to themselves.

All the kids played well together, and the parents all got along well, too. It's always a plus when the parents can enjoy themselves, too.

Biscuit's birthday isn't until tomorrow, but he really enjoyed his weekend celebration.