One of the best weddings I've ever been to was at a Children's Museum. It was simply so much fun to play with the bubble machines, climb on the vertical mazes (see photo above), and talk into the echo-tubes.Matt and I also wanted to saturate our wedding with fun, beyond the standards: drinking, eating, and dancing (although we definitely wanted those, too!). Over the course of two days (both our reception and the Welcome Picnic on Friday), we incorporated the following fun activities:
1. Cooking S'mores around a campfire
2. Soaking in a hot-tub
3. Playing volleyball
4. Offering a swing dance lesson
5. Playing board games (e.g., Jenga, Scrabble, Uno)
6. Playing horseshoes
I'd like to brainstorm a list for other couples who want to introduce an element of fun into their weddings, too:
7. Taking pictures in a photobooth
8. Playing lawn games (e.g., Bocce Ball, Croquet, Badminton, Horseshoes, etc.)
9. Jumping on pogo sticks
10. Having a hula-hooping contest
11. Doing a scavenger hunt
12. Playing BINGO
13. Hosting a talent show
14. Hiring a fortune teller, palm reader, etc.
15. Playing middle school games (e.g., tetherball, kickball, dodgeball, hopscotch, four-square, etc.)
16. Playing ping-pong or pool
17. Competing for prizes (e.g., potato sack race, bean-bag toss, etc.)
18. Making big bubbles
19. Playing card games (e.g., poker, rummy, hearts, uno)
20. Playing Frisbee golf
21. Playing charades or pictionary
22. Renting an air-hocking table
23. Offering chair massages
24. Busting open a pinata
25. Eating fondue
26. Making crafts at a craft table
27. Renting a juke-box
28. Playing casino games
29. Sidewalk chalk
30. Graffiti wall
31. Hosting a parade
32. Contradancing
33. Covering tables with butcher or craft paper and supplying the crayons!
I'd love to generate more ideas. Please leave your ideas in a comment!
17 comments:
I just discovered your blog yesterday and I LOVE IT! I love the idea of having a wedding at a children's museum, because everyone is still a kid at heart. It sounds like your wedding was packed with fun!
Hi There - I meant to ask, though its not related to this post, how did making your bouquet out of grocery store flowers go? Were you able to just cut the stems short and wrap ribbons? Did your bridesmaids have bouquets as well (or the groom and his men at all?)
I like your idea about the children's museum - i actually work at a childrens museum (in indianapolis) and people get married there all the time and it does look like a lot of fun!
How about bocce ball or croquet?
oh my god PICTIONARY!!!
I LOVE pictionary! but even though we're having a danceless, parlor-game style reception, I never thought of pictionary. My fiance and I are an unbeatable pictionary team...great idea, thanks!
I love the idea of mini golf
My favorite one thus far that I will DEFINITELY be doing, is setting up a big screen and our Wii. I have seen it done, and it's such a blast! The pictures turn out great as well.
I also like the idea of having a cigar roller. The guys love that one.
I love Trivia - especially the 80's!
Ooh...How about kid games? Hungry-Hungry Hippo, Connect-Four, Shoots & Ladders...
We're going to have a caricature artist and, since the wedding has a beachy-hawaiian feel, a polynesian dance revue, complete with auduence involvement!
One of the best birthday parties we ever threw for my fiance included a box full of hats- construction hat, kid-sized mini cowboy hat, etc. In addition to the hats, we made him wear some sort of crazy robe we'd purchased at a thrift store. It was so much fun- especially after a few drinks. Therefore, we're going to bust out a box of costumes during our wedding reception, which will be partly for our homemade photo booth, but also so people can wear them on the dance floor during our reception.
The best is when someone you don't expect puts on a crazy wig or hat.
my wedding site has a balcony overlooking the strand area of town. i'm putting a telescope and a couple pairs of binoculars out. i'm also setting up a photo corner with props, and our rehearsal dinner will probably be on the beach with a grill, volleyball, and sandle castle kits. i just have to make sure noone gets sunburned!!!
for those with a gaming interest, Taboo is probably one of the funnest games i've ever played with a group.
Pakistani weddings involve dancing and singing for days! Since we're doing our wedding for $2000, we can't have a celebration that lasts a week. So, what we're doing is having a henna night the night before the wedding. The building complex we live in is letting us have a small gathering for free at the club house.
For the henna night,we'll have henna tubes for the guests to mess around with. Also, I'm learning to work with henna so I can mingle with the guests and do designs for them.
For the reception, I want to do a Bollywood meets Hollywood theme. At Pakistani weddings, the weddings guests usually put on a show for the bride & groom, it's mostly dancing routines from Bollywood movies. Since most of our friends are music majors who have excellent voices, we're going to ask them to do broadway numbers. :D
We were considering a reception site at a kid's summer camp that had archery and a ropes-course. While this fell through, we loved the idea!
Also, we're going with a theme reception: Star Wars. I don't care how hokey it sounds, it's going to be a blast: costume contest, star wars face-painting, board games, and a photo booth. Also karaoke. :)
how about letting guests paint a portrait of you? so fun!!!
see: http://weddingdiplomat.blogspot.com/2009/09/german-wedding-activity-paint-your-own.html
I am a retired roller derby skater so I rented out an old school skate rink for 2 hours before the wedding. I am so excited for my special skate dress and cute pictures of my family and friends skating around. Everyone is worried about sweating, but I think a fun wedding means sweat. We were going to get sweaty on the dance floor anyway, right?
Our wedding will be in October, and our budget is $5,000, not $2,000, but we're having it in our backyard (of a house we haven't bought yet.) We plan on setting up Rock Band in the living room, weather permitting we are renting a bouncy house for the kids, and putting up a stand-up photo prop - royal coldstream guard (fiance is English,) Canadian mountie (I'm Canadian) and a little cowgirl for my daughter that was born in good old Houston, Texas. She also insists that we somehow include the Imperial Sugar factory, since we're in Sugar Land.
I was just reading your blog again (i read it a lot last summer before our wedding on Sept 6, 2009) and saw the post about crayons and butcher paper--we did this for our wedding! We actually bought boxes of crayolas (back to school sale at target: 25 cents a box!) and printed out our own personalized labels--instant wedding favors, and yes, we took photos of all of the drawings on the tables, too, for keepsakes. What else? we also had baby goats at our wedding--hired a woman who usually brings them to kid's bday parties-was awesome and well worth the money. another thing I did was a "flower shower"--instead of purchasing flowers or having a wedding shower, I had a party at a local "pick your own" farm nearby the day before, and flowers were 25 cents a stem, 50 cents for sunflowers. we had the greatest flowers at our wedding and in my hair, and everyone said it was the best shower they'd been to in a long time.
I've been enjoying your blog as I wedding-plan long-distance from Spain. I'm from the U.S. and am marrying a lovely Mexican guy, and we're thinking of playing lotería at our wedding--it's like Mexican Bingo, replete with funky vintage Mexican images like "la luna", "el soldado", etc. They will probably also feature prominently in the invitations! Thanks for the inspiration!
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