Paint Gun War Party

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This past weekend was the mother-son dance at the elementary school. Our boys were super excited about it; not because of the dance itself, but because of the mother-son activity they knew we would be planning instead of the dance.

See, for the past few years, a group of us have been going to the dance together. Our boys are the best of friends and we moms are the best of friends, too! We always start out with dinner-the boys usually choose the pizza place down the street. Afterwards, we go to the dance where there’s a picture booth and, of course, dancing. Cody isn’t a big fan of dancing; Ryder likes to move his body. They mostly just like to go to hang out with all their friends. And their mom, of course. And eat Oreo cookies; that’s Ryder’s favorite part.

Last year was a bit of a fiasco. After our traditional dinner out, we arrived at the dance and one of our friends didn’t make the list, despite them turning in their money (the teacher actually found the money Monday morning; it had been misplaced). To make a very long story short, they wouldn’t let them in the dance since their name was not on the list and our friend’s son was in tears. The rest of our boys were really bummed that their friend had to leave the party and it put a damper on our whole evening, so we decided to leave the dance and make our own party at home. We went to our friend Mickelle’s house where we threw our own dance party and ate ice cream. It ended up being such a fun night and the boys thought it was even more fun that the school dance! We even got some slow dancing in 🙂

A lot of things have changed this year. Our friend, Heather, is home-schooling one of her two boys and Mickelle moved to another city. Her oldest son is Cody’s best friend. Needless to say, all of these changes didn’t make for an exciting mother-son activity at the school, since half our friends were gone! After our fun party last year, the boys kept asking about having another “home” party for the mother-son activity and it made sense given the situation. We (moms) put our heads together and decided to plan a night that the boys would always remember!

I saw an idea a while ago for a creative date night with friends; it was a paintball fight, but using paint in squirt guns instead of an actual paintball gun. I suggested it to my other mom friends and it sounded right up our boy’s alley! When we told them what he had planned, they were ecstatic!

I have to admit, there was a small moment where I thought twice about doing this. I almost called my friends back and suggested we do something a little less messy and would take less effort, but I am so glad we went through with it! I can’t even tell you what an amazing night it turned out to be!

We started out with pizza and music at my house. After a lot of different ideas thrown around, we decided to go with tie-dye as our paint of choice because we wanted to create a shirt that they could keep as a memory of our night. Washable paint would’ve been the least messy, but of course it would wash out. Craft paint dries hard on fabrics. Tie-dye was just right! We bought a pack of tie-dye colors and white shirts for all of us to wear. We bought the squirt guns at The Dollar Tree. They did end up leaking a bit, but they were great for what we were doing. When it was time for the paintball fight, we filled up the guns with the tie-dye and water. It was more water than you’d usually use for tie-dye, but they still got plenty of color on their shirts. We also bought shower caps and goggles at The Dollar Tree to protect our hair and eyes! (Okay, it was really just to protect the mom’s hair, lol).

I made a background for a photo booth, since that was always the moms favorite part of the night-getting pictures with our boys! I reused an idea from my my 80’s birthday party backdrop. It seemed fitting for a paint party! I bought a plastic tablecloth from The Dollar Tree and poured different colors of acrylic paint onto paper plates. I mixed each color with a bit of water and dipped a painting sponge in the colors, then splattered it across the plastic cloth. I think it was the perfect background for our mother-son pictures!

And now for the highlight of the night: the paint fight! We live on a golf course, so it was the perfect place for our paint war! We started at sunset, so the golfers were out of the way. The boys had plenty of room to spread out and we had a blast chasing each other around! We only had one rule and that was to aim for the white shirts. We all dressed in pants and shoes we didn’t care about because we knew that they would inevitably end up with paint on them. And they did, but the boys did pretty good about trying to keep their aim on the shirts. And yes, we totally wore shower caps! The goggles were a great save too!

One tip for next time: we should have worn gloves. We didn’t realize how leaky the guns would be, especially when pumping on the trigger. Just a fair warning: the paint will stay on you for a couple of days, so don’t do this before you have somewhere nice to go. It was long-sleeved shirts for us for a couple of days, ha ha. Actually, it really wasn’t that bad; our hands got the worst of it, but the rest washed off after a couple of showers. The more scrubbing, the faster it comes off. We did this on Friday night and by Sunday morning you could hardly tell what shenanigans we’d gotten into, aside from a little bit of staining left on our hands.

Lucky for us, we have a pool in our community. When we were done with our fun on the golf course, we took the kids up to the pool where they were able to rinse off in the outdoor shower. Then they changed into their suits (we moms wore ours under our clothes) and we had some jacuzzi time. This also helped to get the dye off faster.

We ended our night with ice cream sundaes back at my house. Ryder got his Oreo cookies to top off his sundaes and that completed his night.

I would have to say that the best part of the night was hearing the boys say how much fun they were having. Each one of them declared it “the best night ever” and said it was “way better than a dance”. It made my mommy heart so happy listening to them and it made the mess so worth it. They loved their night so much that they all wore their shirts to school Monday. I would say that Mother-Son Night 2019 was a huge success. Now the only problem is, how do we top this next year??

Some supplies you will need for your paintball war: