What kind of Valentine’s Day Party can I throw for boys?  Are they too grown up for hearts and kisses? These are the kind of deep and mind boggling questions I mulled over this past week, ha. I Spy Party was the winner idea!

A few years back, I threw my boys and their friends a Ladybug Valentine’s Day party.  Yup, click over to the link so you can see for yourself how non-boyish it was, but heck in their eyes it was in the insect category, so it was cool.

But it’s all different now that my oldest is 10 years old.  So last night, I decided an “I Spy” type of party would be fun.  Especially since we already had a scavenger hunt activity planned.  From that activity evolved a Spy party.

Before I share our simple party, I’ll add that our party would’ve been cancelled if I hadn’t already invited guest. It was the worst week ever. I was feeling sick all week with migraines and vomiting as a result of the  headaches.  I had something going on pretty much everyday–and each day at least one of the activities were emotionally, mentally and physically draining.  To end my week the day of our party one of our water pipes bursts in the kitchen. With water flooding into my kitchen floor creating a chaotic mess.  All the while mopping, I’m trying to make breakfast, get ready for the party, take out all the our food and stuff out of our pantry so our things don’t get ruin.  Our party was after lunch, so I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for our party as my plan was to spend the morning getting ready for it.

At one point, I looked over at the time and realized that it was 11 a.m. and I still didn’t have a plumber at my house.  I stepped out of the kitchen and my house was in complete disarray and then it hit me–we haven’t made Valentine’s Day cards for the kids we had invited, AAAAAHHHHH.

Okay, enough of my traumatic week, I can literally go on and on and on about everything that made it awful but I won’t because this post is about a party, having fun and enjoying life which is what I was able to do shortly after our guest arrived.

Spy Party Ideas

The whole idea of a spy party got started because I was planning to do a scavenger hunt for our homeschool v-day party and that quickly evolved into a mission impossible activity.

The kids had to deactivate the bombs to find out the clues for the scavenger hunt. But I wasn’t going to make it that easy for them once they had the clue they would have to decode it because it was written in invisible ink. Sprinkling in some V-day theme stuff their mission was to find the hearts that were stolen from Saint Valentine and bring them back to us.

The hearts had what love is, written on them from I Corinthians: Patient, Kind, not prideful, doesn’t boast, doesn’t keep a record of wrongs…. My hope is to get around to sharing with your the scavenger hunt with you in detail, at some point.

“Bombs” made from toilet paper tubes!

Every Spy Party needs some Spy Training activities.  Even if it’s just for the sake of getting their wiggles out.  We had kids of all ages so I was trying to be intentional in NOT using the word “race”, to not overwhelm the little ones.

The training activities I came up with, came together as we went along.  Remember my water pipe that broke just hours before the party. We have a long driveway so we had them run to the end and back.  Yup, just run.  It was great.

Then we had them jump, skip and do baby steps to the end and back (I told them this one was to see how well they could follow instructions.)

Then I had them go through an easy obstacle course that involved a hula hoop, jumping into a sand pit and then crawling through a laser beam web to get out of a “building”.  They loved the laser beam web.  They asked to do it over and over again.  Which I was glad because my short list of activities were quickly running out.  Then we had them go on their Mission Impossible hunt to gather the hearts that had been stolen from St. Valentine.  Our last training was  to prove they really were spy material so they had to jump over an obstacle (box) and do something cool.  We had kids do somersaults over it, jump over it, jump on top of it (fall through it), walk around it…

Here’s a close up of our fun little spy edibles!

Heart decoder glass! Isn’t this absolutely adorable!  I actually burned most of them so I wasn’t able to put one in each of their Spy Kits, like I had planned.

“You’re dynamite!” candy roll! You can’t tell but the tags were so messed up. I literally made these tags 10 minutes before our guest arrive and you could tell with all the errors on them.

And just incase they didn’t get enough sugar, ha. We had “You’re the bomb!” lollipops.

And of course we had sugar cookie decorating!

Each child took turns passing out the Valentines they put together for their friends and we ended our fun day.

My little guy along with his brothers helped their daddy make these heart crayons, earlier this week.

We actually had not planned to use these for v-day. But since I had forgotten about making their Valentine’s Day cards with them and my little one couldn’t’ make his without my help, we ended up giving these fun heart crayons out.

Before they left I handed them an official “You’re a Spy” kit to do at home.  The mission was to do secret service acts for others in their home.  I loved the idea so much that I had to print it out though I’m not sure how much these types of things get used once one leaves the party.  I found this fun idea over at Melissa & Doug Blog.

 

In spite of my absolute horrible day and week, I’m thankful that I was able to do host this for my boys and their homeschool friends.  These types of activities are the things that help make them feel like they are a part of something. Later that day, I went to rest because my headache was coming back, my son poked his head in my room and thanked me for a fun day.