Carnival Themed At-Home Date Night

May 25, 2020

When I wrote my post on 15 At-Home Date Night Ideas, I didn’t realize just how long we’d all be staying in for so I thought it was time to share another at-home date night (or date day!) idea- a carnival themed at-home date night!

They announced that here in British Columbia our big fair, the PNE, is definitely cancelled for the summer and so I thought I would bring a bit of that fair-experience home for our May date night and do a Carnival themed at-home date night. Read on for ideas for planning your own at-home carnival date!

Food & Drinks:

Let’s get right to the best part, shall we? lol. A lot of the typical carnival food is actually really easy to re-create at home! As far as substantive food, you can pick up some frozen corn-dogs & waffle fries to keep things easy. You can also make some popcorn and serve it in those cute popcorn containers that carnivals use!

For sweets, I’d suggest some cotton candy, mini donuts & apple slices with caramel sauce for dipping. Did you know you can make your own cotton candy at home? This cotton candy machine is under $40 and has the cutest retro look to it!

For the caramel apple slices, slice up a few apples and prepare a caramel sauce for dipping. I made this 5-minute, 5-ingredient caramel dip and it worked perfectly! I then prepared a dish of toppings to dip the caramel apple slices in which included chopped peanuts, chocolate chips and rainbow sprinkles.

Our local fair, the PNE, is creatively finding ways to open without opening the fair. This weekend the did a mini-donuts drive through where you could go and get a bag of mini-donuts from each of the 4 vendors the PNE has making them. Check if your local fair is doing anything like this!

For drinks, I just had a ton of pop and beer on hand. Then for a signature cocktail I did cotton candy cocktails… which is super easy; it’s just champagne with a poof of cotton candy placed on top. It melts in as you drink and it’s delicious!

The Set Up:

Turn your house into the fairgrounds and set different games & activities in each room! I kicked Alex out of the house to set this carnival date up. Poor guy had to wander around Vancouver for an hour lol. When Alex came back I had created a “Fair Map” where I drew (well, attempted to draw) the layout of our apartment and then I marked the different rooms with the games, marked the kitchen as the ‘refreshment stand’ and even labelled the restrooms and emergency exit haha.

I then gave Alex 3 tickets (I picked up a pack of tickets at the dollar store) and told him that each game was labelled with a cost of tickets to play and how many tickets you could win.

There was then a prize booth with a cost of tickets labelled on each prize. Again, I just picked up a ton of dollar store goodies and got creative. The prizes included chapstick, candy, an ab roller (random but we’re on a fitness kick right now), a $10 bill, and a coffee cup symbolizing that whoever won this prize won a week’s worth of coffee (paid for by the other person) from our local coffee shop.

The Games:

The games/activities I created for our carnival date night at home were:

“Pick a Duck”: You know that kid game where the pick ducks out of water and every duck is a winner? I wanted to recreate that! I couldn’t find rubber ducks so I used ping pong balls. I used a water proof sharpie to write a number 1-6 on each of the ping pong balls. I then filled up the bathtub in our guest bedroom and that became the ‘pick a duck’ game area.

Guess How Many Game: Prior to our date day I went to my friend Britta’s house to borrow her cotton candy machine (from a distance!) and also had her pour two jars of candy (mini eggs in one , sour patch kids in the other) counting how many was in each. She wrote it down on a piece of paper and handed it to me so I wouldn’t know. Then Alex and I each got to guess how many were in each jar! (for the record, Alex one. I was terrible at this game haha!)

Bowling: With limited options as to stores and stock availability right now I had to get creative. I cut holes in cardboard boxes and lined them up in a row. I then got a ball and we ‘bowled’ to try to get the ball into the holes.

Darts: I found a velcro dart board game at the dollar store and hung that in our living room. Easy peasy!

Bean Bag Toss: I used our balcony for this game, taping down construction paper squares of different sizes (with points written on each – higher points the smaller the square.) Then we had a starting line from where we had throw a bean bag attempting to get the highest points possible.

Balloon Pop: I decided to put a ‘date night spin’ on this classic carnival game. I filled our master bedroom with dozens of balloons and set it up so that Alex had 60 seconds to pop as many as he could. I filled each balloon with a piece of paper – on each was here a # of tickets he won, a # of tickets lost (gotta have some risk!), or a note telling him one thing I love about him.

It was SUCH a fun date! I can’t recommend this at-home date night theme enough! .. Though the sugar hangover the next day is ROUGH you guys haha.

Thanks for reading today’s post! I hope you all are doing well in quarantine and finding ways to make life feel a bit more ‘normal’. Today is busy one for me, I’m in Court all day by phone (definitely still adjusting to telephone court.) Have a great day and I’ll be back on Wednesday with another post – one that was requested by my instagram followers! (hint: it’s makeup/beauty related!)