4th of July

Happy 4th of July!  In typical PNW fashion, the weather was cool, mid sixties, until the sun finally came out.  It was great!  Randy was in charge of the annual church breakfast which meant there was a ton of food and a ton of leftovers.  The decorations were on point so everyone knew as soon as they pulled up to the park that Randy Ball was in charge.  Randy had a "founding father" recite the pledge of allegiance and then one of our talented teens sang the National Anthem.  Good times were had and Parker was awesome for inviting a bunch of his friends.  They all had a great time.

I sliced two crates, not boxes, crates of strawberries.  

Kristina, our office manager, bought decorations for the kids to decorate their bikes with for the bike parade.  The prizes were bags full of swag.  Kristina knows not to do anything halfway for Dr Ball.

Notice all the bunting by Randy.  He says we can use it for our house (insert eye roll and laughing emoji here).

After the breakfast we braved the boat launch and it turned out no one was out on the lake.

The best kind of boating is when I can read a book

Marcus spent the 4th of July in Paris with our good friends, the Walker's.  

We literally had hundreds of sparklers because Randy bought a ton and so did one of the other dads.  We finally stopped helping the kids light them and just walked away.  They figured it out themselves and no one got hurt, although a few small fires were stomped out of the lawn.

Our backyard is seriously magical with the lights and the kids playing and the s'mores being roasted.  

We had a little pre-firework show in the front yard that was actually crazy.  I ever knew fireworks could be so big, loud, and smokey.

Our trees are starting to get too big for perfect viewing but it still beats fighting the crowds and parking to watch the show from anywhere else.  There were so many kids/adults/teens on the roof this year that they didn't fit.

The state of my laundry room is how I gauge the chaos level of my life.  This was an all-time high level.

New Year's Eve

We had another epic New Year's Eve Party.  We invited a lot of new friends who have never experienced our party before so that made it extra fun. 

We did another newspaper ball.  We really need to rename it since we use wrapping paper, not newspaper, but you get the idea.  The ball was too big with too much stuff (Randy was behind this of course).  There were kids quitting halfway through because they already had enough and then there were Karens moms who took things into their own hands when they saw some of their kids didn't have enough.  (insert a huge eye roll from me here.) So next year we will do less and remind them of the two rules.  1-no crying and 2-no complaining if you don't roll doubles.

We had so much food!  I took this picture after we were a couple hours into the party and there was still a ton of food left.  My new island worked perfect for this.  One end had the savory items and the other end had the sweets.  The counter behind it had the drink station.  The biggest hit was Randy's 8 dozen Krispy Kreme donuts.  We had four dozen left over #donutsfordays 

We played some fun games.  Randy made up a new one we will call karaoke Jenga. You had 30 seconds to pull a block out and whatever block you touched was the one you had to remove, no trying to find a loose block.  If you knocked down the tower you had to perform a karaoke song.  The pressure was on and the game was intense but fun.  Definitely a new tradition.

The thing I will always remember from this night was the floating lanterns.  Most of them didn't float!  But we sure had fun trying and then once we got a few in the air we are cheering and filming and it was hilarious.  The secret was to light them inside the garage and once they completely filled with air, then we took them out and released them.  It looked so cool!  

The lanterns that failed :)

Watch the ball drop HERE