Beach-Themed Ice Cream Party Playdate #IceCreamTreat

For me, May always sig­nals the start of sum­mer. Here in the Phoenix area, May is when the tem­per­a­tures really start heat­ing up and by Memo­r­ial Day nearly all of the schools are out. So, we thought it would be great to kick off sum­mer with a lit­tle water play, beach-themed play date. And, what goes bet­ter with those kind of sum­mer­time activ­i­ties than some nice cold ice cream?!

We had a few of our friends over for some morn­ing water fun! The kid­dos had a few dif­fer­ent water activ­i­ties to choose from– the “fish­ing pond”, the slip ‘n slide, and the crazy sprin­kler (plus our nor­mal out­door toys). They had a blast while we moms enjoyed chat­ting!

Dur­ing play time, we had some snacks and then lunch. I made a few fun beach-themed foods, like a beach ball fruit pizza and a veg­gie octo­pus swim­ming in ranch dip! They were both a BIG hit! We pot-lucked it for lunch, so then had a vari­ety of yummy foods.

Then, after all that play­ing, it was time for some ice cream! For our sup­plies, we shopped at Smart & Final and pur­chased some First Street ice cream treats! (For full details, you can check out my Google+ story here.) There were lots of great items to choose from–I even found lit­tle para­sols, per­fect for “beach umbrellas”.

Even though the super pops sounded per­fectly beachy, I didn’t think they’d hold up well out for too long (we did buy them though and they are SO good! Per­fect for sum­mer!). So, we opted for just a beach-themed sun­dae bar instead! I bought vanilla for the kids and some choco­late chip cookie dough as an extra option for the adults! For the beach-themed sun­daes, we started by scoop­ing the ice cream into our handy plas­tic bowls and flat­ten­ing it out in the container.

Once the ice cream was fairly flat in the bowl, we sprin­kled crushed gra­ham crack­ers over about half and then blue sprin­kles on the other half. Then, to com­plete the beach scene, the gra­ham cracker sand got a drink para­sol beach umbrella!

These turned out pretty cute as is. But, you can’t have a sun­dae bar with­out some fab­u­lous top­pings. And, in this case, we stuck to our beachy, ocean theme. There are SO many fun can­dies and things that you could use for an ocean/beach theme. We went with swedish fish ocean fish, Rips sea­weed, Trolly crawlers elec­tric eels, and crushed gra­ham crack­ers sand. The sauces were a lit­tle tougher. Just about every­thing I could come up with was a lit­tle on the “icky” side. After much “brain rack­ing”, I just went with it… choco­late sauce squid ink, caramel sauce sea slug slime, and straw­berry sauce fish chum. LOL!

The kids LOVED it! No sur­prise that the candy was an espe­cially big hit! Just about all of them wanted an ocean fish, elec­tric eel, and some sea weed! They had a blast cre­at­ing and then eat­ing their spe­cial beach sun­daes! It was the per­fect way to kick off summer!

Are YOU ready for summer?!

For more info on First Street prod­ucts or Smart & Final, check them out here: