We celebrate a lot of our family member’s birthdays at home, because it’s a great way to celebrate a birthday in a frugal manner. It’s budget-friendly and you can also treat your kids to a great birthday. Our parties certainly aren’t anything extravagant, but we do get our children things like balloons, colored cups, decorated plates and streamers. When you buy items like this, you’re always going to have leftovers at the end of the day. A lot of people just throw these leftovers in the trash, which is a complete and total waste. I’m going to give you some tips on what you could do with these items, rather than throwing them away.

Make Water Balloons

Kids absolutely love water balloons and you have some balloons leftover anyways, so why not. If you didn’t have the party on a warm day, you can just save the balloons and wait for the perfect day to present itself to enjoy this activity. Get out your balloons, take them outside and fill them up with some water from the hose. Once they’re filled up with water, simply tie the balloon in knot, like you’d normally do if you were blowing the balloon up.

As for the game, you could choose to have a water balloon fight. Just play by dodgeball rules and you will have a great time. If you want to enjoy the water balloons in a more tones down manner, you could consider a water balloon toss. Basically, allow everyone to pick a teammate and have them stand a few feet away from their teammate. Everyone tosses their balloon back and forth to their teammate and the last team standing with a balloon that hasn’t busted is the winner.

Build a Fort

Kids absolutely love to build forts, especially on rainy days. If you have leftover party table clothes, you could give them to your kids and allow them to make a fort with them or you could help them during the fort building process.

Make Masks

After we throw a birthday party for our kids, we always find that we have an absolute ton of party plates leftover. As I said above, most people throw these things out, but you can use them to make masks with your kids, instead. Of course, smaller children are going to need help when cutting out the eyes and the mouth in the plate.

Do you still have some party streamers leftover? Well, if you trust your kids with glue, you could give them the party streamers and they could glue some of the streamers onto their mask. Also, you could give them confetti if you have any leftover. Also, remind them that they have crayons, markers and colored pencils to decorate their masks with, as well.

Making masks can lead to a big mess, especially when the creation process involves glue, confetti, etc… Therefore, make sure your children understand that they will have to clean up the messes that they make. Either way, they’re going to have a great time!