July 4th Goodies

We had such a wonderful July 4th and I've been meaning to post pictures but I took so many that it's taken me some time to download them all! I have a lot of fun things to share but I thought I'd start with our goodie bags.

My parents live in a small town that has a parade right down their street every year, and it has long been our tradition to have a huge parade-watching party with a cookout afterwards. There are always tons of kids and of course they love the parade! We always fill up hundreds of water balloons and throw a few fun sprinklers on the lawn for them to enjoy while lunch is cooking. A few years back I started a tradition of providing goodie bags for all the kiddoes. I prefer to personalize them with each child's name but a lot of times we don't know who is going to show up!

The last couple of years it's been fun to have my stepkids help pick out the goodies for the bags. I think I have as much fun planning and putting it all together as the kids do ripping them apart to find their treasures!

This year my stepdaughter chose tie-dye fabric bags to put the goodies in...at first I would have preferred them to be exclusively in July 4th colors, but these actually turned out really cute! I painted the names that we knew on some of the bags and left the rest blank.

The goodies inside this year included:

• sparkly pompom (chosen by my stepson)
• bubbles
• star ring
• two necklaces 
• 2 tattoos
• small inflatable ball
• colorful sunglasses 

My sister added a bunch of glow-in-the-dark bracelets as well. 

What a hit! Sadly the threat of rain kept several families away, and our favorite-large-family-of-many-boys (hi Mrs. B.!) were away on vacation, so we didn't have as many kids as usual. We had several bags left over...but as always my motto is better too many than not enough!

We all had so much fun, and I'll be posting soon about some of the other party events!