Yesterday was sunny and warm, with just enough of a breeze to make playing outside tolerable. Perfect conditions for a BYOP party. BYOP or Bring Your Own Pool was the theme of our playgroup’s last get together of the season. (My daughter’s playgroup goes on hiatus during the summer months when families are on vacation and older children are home from school.) The premise was simple, the results were phenomenal, and the idea for a homemade water park is one I just had to share.
Just as the invitation stated, each mom was responsible for contributing a plastic kiddie pool (our playgroup consists of ten 1-to-3 year-olds) or other water toys from sprinklers to super soakers. A couple of days before the party, the playgroup mom hosting the party (she lives on a farm and have acres of open space, perfect for hosting this type of party, though you can tailor it to fit your own yard) picked up the pools and other water paraphernalia from each of our homes. By doing so she had enough time to fill each pool and make sure the water temperature was just right for the kids.
By the time we arrived, her yard had been transformed into a virtual water playground. There were five different plastic kiddie pools arranged in a circle. Each one had a unique feature: one had a little slide, another she filled with floating animal toys, yet another shaped like an elephant, had water spewing from its trunk (via an attached hose). As you know, toddlers aren’t known for their sharing skills, so the set up was genius. With so many options the kids never had the chance to fight over who got what, when. Every so often we had the children rotate so that they each got a turn in all of the pools.
But, the pools were only part of the “Playgroup Water Park.” This fabulous mom had also carved out a portion of the yard for a Sprinkler Fest, which included an Elmo Sprinkler, a Dora Sprinkler and a Beach Ball Sprinkler. (The Beach Ball Sprinkler is a large inflatable beach ball with various holes that shoot out water. Again, the mom who hosted our party lives on a farm with multiple hoses. If you are hosting your own BYOP party and have just one hose, you could alternate the sprinklers.) The children had a blast running through the arches of water and by having more than one sprinkler the timid toddlers could congregate near one without having their braver counterparts push them out of the way.
Rounding out the homemade water park were a couple of sand boxes (one was a two-sided activity table with sand on one side and water on the other) and a battery operated bubble machine that filled the backyard with thousands of bubbles… which were soon outnumbered by the screeches, screams, smiles and laughter from ten toddlers chasing after bubbles that clearly didn’t want to be caught.
The party was a wonderful success and can be easily recreated in your own backyard (provided you have others willing to contribute the necessary provisions). I may have to think of hosting a scaled down version of the party myself. As we were driving home from our day at the “Playgroup Water Park” my two-year-old daughter asked, “Mommy, you take me dare again?”
***If you prefer to skip the do-it-yourself-water park to visit the real deal, consider reading these related articles: