How To Create a Balloon Filled Shark Tank

Last week I shared my son’s Shark Themed Birthday Party with you, and today I’m sharing how we created a Balloon Filled Shark Tank for the kids to go “Swimming with a Shark”. You might be thinking a couple of things like “Wow, that’s a lot of balloons” and “I wouldn’t want to blow all those up!” and “What did you do with them when you were done?” Well, I’ll tell you all about it. 🙂

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Our secret weapon to getting all these balloons blown up was the HomeRight Finish Max Paint Sprayer! Say what? Yes!! Not only is this the most amazing paint sprayer (see my Entertainment Center that I painted with it) but it has an attachment to blow air with it. So when we got the crazy idea that we could fill the trampoline up with balloons, we knew we’d use this to blow them up!

It took use 2-3 hours to blow up 600+ balloons. We learned a couple of things along the way. You want to make sure you use high-quality balloons. I bought mine from a party supply store, and they came in bags of 72. I bought a small bag of silver balloons from Wal-mart, and we had 4 of the 12 pop while blowing them up. The quality wasn’t as good on them. We also learned that it works well to have one person blowing up the balloons and another person tying the balloons.

We corralled all the balloons into the living room the night before the party.

When it was almost party time, we had our boys help get them all out of the house and into the trampoline. We put a tarp over the top of the trampoline for a couple of reasons. To help shade it so they didn’t all pop right away, and to try and help keep them inside. If we did it again, we’d make sure we had a larger tarp.

The kids had an absolute blast “Swimming with a Shark” in our “Shark Tank”. They thought it was fun to find the shark. It looked like so much fun that I even had to try it!

All the kids had fun, and after the party was over, my boys had some more fun playing in the balloons on the trampoline.

So you might be wondering what happened to all the balloons? Well, the party was on a Saturday, and we left the balloons out there over night. They were still there on Sunday morning, and we headed off to church, planning to come home after and pop the balloons. We got home from church, and one of my boys says “I want to see the balloons”, I said, “They are all still there, go get changed out of your church clothes, and then you can see them.” I looked out the window after I said that, and said to my husband, “The balloons are all gone!” We couldn’t believe it. While we were at church, the wind was blowing just enough that it blew them away! We had about four left in the trampoline, plus lots of popped ones. We found popped ones all over our yard, and had to go to the neighbor’s yard to clean up the popped balloons too! We got a laugh out of it though.