13th Birthday Party Ideas

For her 13th birthday party, our daughter wanted to spend an evening hanging out with a few of her closest friends. Her birthday is in early June, when the weather can be pretty unpredictable, so we decided to come up with some activities that would be good inside and also some that would be fun if the girls could be outdoors. When the day of the party arrived, we lucked out with perfect weather, so in the end we used ALL of the 13th birthday party ideas that we had planned!

DECORATIONS

Because this was a 13th birthday party, we wanted the decorations to be bright and colorful, but not too over the top or childish. We used lots of balloons and some cheery polka dotted tableware. We also hung some colorful twisty danglers from the ceiling. To welcome everybody, we put a "Happy Birthday" banner across the front door. Everything was pretty simple, but in the end it all looked great.


OUTSIDE ACTIVITIES

We started the evening outside with some classic party games. The girls had a water balloon toss, played capture the flag, and ran a "dizzy bat" relay (to do this you stand a bat straight up, put your forehead on the handle end, pivot around the bat 10 times, and then stand up and try to run in a straight line to tag the next person on your team at the end of the race course -- it's definitely not as easy as it sounds!)

INSIDE ACTIVITIES

After taking a break for dinner, we moved things inside. For this part of the evening we planned a black light party. To do this we covered all the windows in our bonus room with heavy butcher paper and replaced our lightbulbs with black lights (which I found at the grocery store). One thing I discovered was that because the room was fairly large, I needed more bulbs than I had originally planned in order to get a good glowing effect. All together we used 6 black lightbulbs scattered around the room. Everyone got a glow in the dark necklace upon entering the black light area. The girls then had fun painting their nails with glow in the dark nail polish, painting their faces with glowing face paint, and using highlighter pens to write glowing messages on their tee shirts and on some large sheets of white paper. They also played ping pong (the white ball lit up under the black lights), Twister, and glow in the dark basketball using a set I picked up inexpensively at Target. The night ended with some very loud karaoke and lots of dancing.

PARTY FOOD

During the outside part of the night, we set out a big cooler filled with bottled water and bottles of lemonade and ice tea. Since it was a warm evening and everybody was running around, this went really fast. For snacks we had popcorn, chips and dip, and a veggie tray.

For dinner we served chicken tenders, corn on the cob, caesar salad and biscuits. The cake was an Oreo Blizzard cake from Dairy Queen. We were going to try to roast marshmallows when it got dark, but unfortunately we ran out of time.

The party was tons of fun, and nobody was really ready for it to end. At the end of the night our daughter told us that it was "the best party ever!!" I guess that's all anyone could ask for...