Glow-in-the-Dark Girls Dance-Theme Birthday Party or "That's Inaproooopriaaaaaate."

You know the feeling you get when you have a really amazing idea, so you throw your back into realizing your brilliant vision for what promises to be the very rock-er-ific party of all time. "The kids will be talking about this for MONTHS," you think as you order your fourth PS3 Move remote, second 4-foot black light, black light hair spray, black light makeup, glow bracelets, black light glitter body gel and glow-in-the-dark lip gloss from the internet. "Oh, their great surprise when they see these glowing black light balloons, neon posters, flashing star accents, disco lights, strobe lights and nightclub-like sofa set-ups. Not to mention their inability to resist this salavation station smattered with popcorn (in individual tubs!), cake pops, ice cream cake, peanut m&ms, regular m&ms, sweet tart party mix, adorable mini pop cans, pizza, breadsticks and MORE."

Yah. That was the first 20 minutes of this party. Then we turned on the new PS3 Dance game. The PS3 Everybody Dance game is great. It's a lot like the dance games for Wii or Xbox. It takes your pictures while you dance and records video of your moves which is fun/funny to watch it played back at the end of your turn. So, yah. It's great. For like, teenagers. For 10 year olds? Not so much. (Even though the ages suggest 10 and up is appropriate.)

Turns out, PS3 thought it'd also be cool to show the music videos for the pop songs while you dance to them. First the girls danced to LMFAO's Party Anthem (video is fairly tame). Then they moved onto Duckface's Barbara Streisand which has a video that features a man dressed up as a woman. No big deal. I actually thought the video was pretty funny. However, for 10 year olds, this sort of thing is fodder for squeals and screeches. It wasn't long before they were asking questions about why the man "has boobs." I didn't have answers that seemed like ones I wanted them to relay to their parents so we moved onto Usher songs. He supported Bieber, right? He's gotta be pretty tame. But this too was short lived. They noted (loudly) that there was a "lady drinking wine in a bikini." " THIS IS INAPPROPRIATE" one yelled. Perfect. Too bad this entire party is centered around this dance game. It wasn't long before they were all squealing and squeaking over what was on screen.

The solution? We did competitions for best score against the birthday girl (super dancer) on the one LMFAO song.


So... if you create your own dance party I highly recommend using Wii dance games or Xbox dance games that do not feature the MTV music videos. Or, you can filter through the PS3 game to find the ones that show kid-friendly music videos.

The Party Table - Ok, I can't pretend I'm not a horrible mother who was so involved in the party itself that I forgot to take pictures ahead of time. So, this is a post-party staging. It's a little more sparse than when all the treat displays were in tact. But you get the idea. Also, the drapes were open and the black light poster was hanging from ribbon attached to the curtain rod above.

Black light balloons and inexpensive microfiber sheets purchased from Walmart for about $15/set. These were great because we needed a couple new sets of queen-size sheets anyway, so I knew investing $30 in party decorations wouldn't go to waste. We also used neon pre-cut letters by Crayola to make the posters.

Another post-party pic. I bought two full length mirrors from Walmart at $5 each for the girls to apply all their blacklight accessories.

Post-party pic but you'll get an idea of the accessories we supplied. Blacklight makeup (just google it and purchase it online), glitter gel, glow bracelets, glow in the dark hair spray, glow in the dark lip gloss. I bought all of these items online.

Lighting! I figured if they tired of the black light, we could move to a strobe light or a disco ball. We used one disco light in the food and makeup prep room and then used the strobe later that night for her sleepover. They LOVED the strobe.

And now for the dancing. We had 4 PS3 wands. Turns out we only needed two. The game couldn't register more than that. And if it could, we couldn't figure out how.

To complete the club atmosphere, we also covered all the sofas with the rest of the white sheet sets and bought a couple neon throw pillows from Walmart. I think the pillows were about $7 each. In addition to the throw pillows we purchased, we took the original throw pillows that go with our sofa and covered them with the white pillow cases that came with the sheets sets.

Look at 'em glow!

 Now take what I did, learn from my mishaps, and do it better. :) Good luck!