Recently, I helped plan the annual summer picnic for one of my long-time, beloved, corporate clients.  I’ve been doing their events for over 12 years. Every year we try to come up with some new and exciting challenges for the kids.  This is the group that did the donut olympics a few years back.  They simply revel in seeing their kids placed in compromising, often messy, situations.

This year was no exception.  

The theme was Hawaiian Luau, so for the obligatory messy game I decided we had to play Mr. Lava Head:

Kids are broken into teams and given a bag of cheese balls (or cheese puffs).  One team member puts on a plastic rain poncho, shower cap, and goggles.  They are then seated about 6 feet away from their team members (who, if space allows, circle the team member). 

The team member’s head is then coated with shaving cream, while the other team members distribute the cheese balls.  On “go” the team has 3 minutes to toss as many cheese balls as they can at their teammate’s head. 

At the end of the 3 minutes, the team with the most cheese balls stuck in the shaving cream, wins!

This group is also way into their crafting - so of course we had to do Mrs. Pineapple Head. 

Pineapples were part of the decor, so it was easy enough for us to steal the centerpieces for this part of the party.  Kids were given the option of working in teams or by themselves.  They had 20 minutes to create their own pineapple friend using any of the materials they could find on our overly stocked crafting table. 

At the end of 20 minutes the pineapples were judged by a panel of adults and prizes were awarded in categories that ranged from “sweetest friend” to “rough and ready”. 

Of course we did the limbo and had a hula hoop contest to round out the activities, but the day belonged to the Pineapples.

Oh, and of course to our annual salami toss, where the salamis sported hula skirts.