Yesterday we went to a friend’s house to watch the Super Bowl. They have a toddler, which was great for our youngest to have someone to play with.
Considering 99% of the toys/games/activities at the house were for their one and a half year old, I was mainly concerned what my two older children were going to do there. Neither one of them really like watching sports on TV. I didn’t really want them to stare at iPads and Kindles for several hours straight either, even though they would be perfectly happy with that (and really, what’s the difference between doing that and watching the game on TV?). I also didn’t want them taking over armloads of toys, after all we were just leaving the house for a few hours, not a weekend trip.
So, I did some Internet searching and found a few Super Bowl activities that I thought my kids would like.
I found a pretty simple activity sheet where kids cut out different parts of a football player and helmet, then color and glue it all together. After printing all these out, I thought it might be better not to take over an activity that involved scissors, glue and markers. If I was going to do something that cruel to my friends and their house I might as well take over paint, glitter, and Play-Doh. Needless to say, we did that activity at home instead.
We also tried to do some prop bets. I gave my kids a quarter for correctly guessing the coin toss. I also offered them a quarter to guess which team would be winning at the end of the first half, but neither of them won that.
The biggest hit of the night for my kids was definitely Super Bowl Commercial Bingo. During the pregame we came up with a list of 25 things we might see during the commercials. Then I randomly wrote all 25 on each person’s bingo card.
We had a pretty good list, it consisted mostly of animals but also some random items we hoped to find in commercials too. We had a cowboy hat, a princess, a beach, roller skates, all of which we found in different commercials.
The one item on our cards I didn’t think we would be able to cross off was, “Old Man Wearing Only His Underwear.” Fortunately there was a David Beckham commercial of him running all over the place in his undies, so we counted him as an old man. I thought that was funny until I looked it up and realized he’s only a year older than I am.
All in all, the party was a success, the kids did great. We were able to stay long enough to watch the Red Hot Chili Peppers on stage during the halftime show. Honestly, that was when I thought we were going to see old men running around in their underwear, but thankfully they were wearing pants, and there was no wardrobe malfunction.
-Pete
