DorkDandy: By The Beach Festival: Grand Entertainments, Photobooth Madness & Stuff for Squids

One thing we knew when we started this escapade, is that we primarily wanted it to be FUN for everyone. Down with decorum! Huzzah!

Games

Knowing that we'd be having Tipi's in a field as our reception location, we crossed our fingers for decent weather and bought... spacehoppers. With a little bunting and some garden canes these became tools for epic inter-couple races/small arguments, a kid war-zone and a great source of mirth and funny photos. We also grabbed a couple of diablos and poi for people to chuck around and a mini rounders kit that we had in the attic. We really should have known better - our families and friends are rather competitive sorts and within an hour of dinner finishing there was the most almighty and raucous game going on and rather funnily - men in suits and women in pretty dresses, shouting mild obscenities at each other and legging it wildly around the field. It was fantastic! We did have a box full of board games for indoors in case the weather turned but luck was on our side for the whole day.

As cheerleaders the world over will know, there is never a time or place where it is definitely inappropriate to stunt. Hell I bet somewhere sometime there will have been stunts at a funeral too. I think my stunt group had been secretly waiting for this day to come for a while - to get me up in the air, when I'm usually a base, firmly attached to the ground (the lovely lovely ground) but I thought hey, I trust them... the nearest hospital is flippin miles away... but I trust them! ;) So this happened... #cheerwedding

Auditory Entertainments

Music makes our world go round! Yeah so everyone was expecting us to have bands I'm sure, but honestly - it was just too much hassle. We'd have had to sort out a stage area and loads of other equipment, it's miles away from anywhere and didn't know any bands in the area. It would have been a headache. Luckily we know some pretty amazing people, and it just so happens that my BFF is also a superstar DJ by night. Dave lent us his mixer and snazzy speakers (and by lent I mean, took all the way there, set up and looked after them for us... thanks dude) and we just plugged in my Kindle, popped on the Spotify playlists I'd spent hours carefully curating, and away we went! With Spotify, you can 'download' playlists to use offline on their Premium service which is perfect. I made one for the daytime and one for the evening, you can wrap your ears around them here:

Daytime Playlist

Evening Playlist

I loved loved loved that so many people enjoyed our music, especially as we have friends and family from all walks of life who might not have liked the same stuff. There's a pretty eclectic mix on there though, take a look! The funniest of all was the guy behind the bar who couldn't believe a wedding had good music, and was dancing and singing the whole night - he may just have *exactly* the same taste in music as me haha! There were a few gems chucked in there that remind me of certain people too, like Reef 'Place Your Hands' which was my cousin Abby & her husband Pete's wedding song, 'The Safety Dance' which is an inside joke for my brother Diefenbaker, relating to a crap film we love called 'Biodome', Muse for DJ Dave, The Prodigy's 'Omen' for the cheerios, Basement Jaxx 'Bingo Bango' for my brother-in-law Ade and loads of others. Music always sparks memories for me, people, places, times, feelings - I think that's probably why it plays such a large part in our lives.

Stuff for Squids (Children for you normos)

We knew that we didn't want to make things difficult for our friends and family with small children, and a long weekend at the seaside is too good an opportunity to pass up right? So we tried to do our best to make sure kids were catered for, from putting as much info in the invitations as we could, making sure they had their own ice bath of fruit shoots for a welcome drink and putting together some activity packs with stuff for them to do.

There were two babies who got RNLI bears to snuggle as part of their packs, and the bigger kids had floral crowns and pirate hats, sea-safe activity booklets, seaside identity wristbands for use the next day, bubbles, spinners, a bucket and spade each for playing on the beach and the most awesome colouring pages which were hand drawn by my Mum. They had scenes of Runswick beach, rock pools with crabs and even the Tipi tents on, she drew them all then we printed enough copies for everyone! We popped in packs of colouring pencils and some sea-themed stickers, and handed them out at dinner, it was great to see the kids racing around in their floral crowns and pirate hats, getting into the festival spirit!

THE EPIC TALE OF THE PHOTOBOOTH DEBAUCHERY

Is how it shall be known for ever more. If I posted the pictures here, my blog would be quarantined into the soft porn section of the internet. My friends are awesome. So somewhere along the line, a challenge was issued, and more and more uncovered bits of people got papped in the marvellous Picabo VW campervan. Bless them, but bro and sis team Will & Georgie were really brave in the face of so many shrieking cheerleaders! They didn't mind that the photos were coming out lewder and ruder each time, they didn't even mind when 11 people crammed into the tiny van for a photo and they brought a fantastic array of props - some of which have seen things they shouldn't. Here's a couple of the nice ones instead...