We love hosting pool parties for our kids' friends at the end of the school year. There's no better way to celebrate the end of a school year than by letting kids jump in and splash around a pool!
This year we decided to make our annual pool party pirate themed!
Keep reading for some awesome pirate-themed ideas that worked well for us!
FOOD:
You can't host a party with kids starving-from-swimming without lots and lots of food! Since there was no entertainment at the party other than the pool, we wanted to make sure there was plenty of fun food to bring home the pirate theme!
For the main course, we did traditional hot dogs with all of the trappings and Crabwiches.
We made the Crabwiches with pre-made croissants, sandwich meat, and sliced American cheese.
For the eyes, we used hot glue to glue small googly eyes to toothpicks and then stuck the toothpicks into the sandwich. Any googly eyes will work. (We purchased ours at Wal-Mart.) If you want to order them on-line, Amazon has some. See below.
For vegetables, we made some carrot & cucumber swords. I found the idea from My Four Boys & Me: Arrgh! A pirate party, matey! (hollyandmark.blogspot.com), whose carrot swords came out much better than mine!
For fruit, we made banana dolphins from No-cook Dolphin Bananas For Kids - One Handed Cooks and a pirate watermelon ship from How to Make a Watermelon Pirate Ship - MomAdvice.
The banana dolphins took a couple of attempts, but we finally figured out how to make the mouths so that they could hold the grapes!
For snack foods, we did black olives as cannonballs; gold fish and Swedish fish as the "catch of the day"; cheese balls as beach balls; and OF COURSE lots of bags of Pirate's Booty!!!
For dessert, we offered the kids "beer" (Root Beer flavored candy sticks) and "Rum" (Rum & Butter flavored candy sticks).
But my FAVORITE part of the dessert was the ocean-themed dessert Charcuterie board we made!
All of the candy came from Wilbur's of Maine and EVERYTHING on the board was 100% edible!
The water consisted of blue and white rock candy with gummy sharks.
The seaweed were small pieces of green sour straws.
We used three kinds of chocolate rocks for the beach: chocolate shells, chocolate pebbles, and large chocolate rocks.
Spread out across the beach were chocolate starfish, gummy lobsters, and chocolate lobster cups.
I wish I could tell you it was delicious, but the kids ate all of it before I got more than one or two chocolate shells, so I'm guessing it was yummy, but I can't guarantee it!! ;-)
DECORATIONS:
The decorations were fairly minimal, since the focal point of the party was the pool and the food, but it wouldn't be a party without at least SOME decor!!
To start with, I wanted to make sure the food table was decorated.
We used a disposable red tablecloth (from Wal-Mart) with black and red plates, utensils, and cups (also from Wal-Mart).
The center piece was a red rose bouquet covered in creepy black fabric from our Halloween decorations. In front of the flowers was our kids' toy Pirate's treasure chest, draped in toy necklaces. And the chest itself was filled with chocolate gold coins!
Outside we had a chalk sign by the pool.
We also had a real Pirate come to the party!! Unfortunately, he came way too early and didn't tell anyone he was there, so this is all that was left of him...
We used a large skeleton (again from our Halloween decorations) and put him in a pirate costume our son had worn for Halloween a couple of years ago. Sadly, his neck didn't want to stay up, so we had to quickly improvise with some good old Scotch tape! ;-)
ENTERTAINMENT
Although most of the entertainment was the pool, we did do a shark pinata for the kids.
The shark was filled with Tootsie Roll variety mix, some Pirate eye patches, Ring Pops, and lots of Pirate's Treasure!! Links to what we used inside the pinata are below.
We had so much fun with our Pirate-themed party!!
If you throw your own Pirate Party, let us know how it goes!!!
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