4th of July! (very late)

Okay, as some of you reading this may know, every 4th of July our family and several other families get together to celebrate with a fun day of relaxation. Well, not quite relaxation. More like intense water balloon battle planning, coordination, and execution. Allow me to explain. Every 4th of July for the last several years, our family along with some of our family friends meet at the parade in a nearby town. Then we tensely suffer through the parade, each of us trying to figure out what the enemies strategy is. As soon as the parade is over each family packs up, practically in a frenzy, and rushes to the van with their children in tow. The party’s always at our house so we just come straight home but everyone else has to go home to grab their food and extra set of clothes (If you didn’t bring an extra set of clothes than you’re going to be wet for a very long time.) If there is to be an alliance between families it needs to happen days or even weeks before hand. This year we were allied with one other family. 🙂 The battle strategy always plays out a little differently, this year we were all either locked in the house or the camper, hiding. Our prey finally arrived and the battle ensued.

Let me tell you about what happened on the night of the 3rd of July. Well, our house and vehicle were vandalized at about 9:30 that night. The above picture is of the door opening onto our second story porch where we hang out our laundry and in years past has been an excellent battle station for daddy to throw down balloons and squirt unsuspecting victims with ice cold water from the hose. Anyway, they (the enemy families) came to our house and set up a latter, climbed to the roof and wrote “love your enemies” on the door. We were all at home and didn’t see or hear anything! They also wrote various Bible verses on the side of the van about loving your enemies, turning the other cheek ect, ect. They also left a smallish ice cream bucket of puny water balloons and a note signed by all of the kids of the two family’s saying that they were very convicted of their ways and that they decided to give us all of their water balloons. 🙂 We didn’t believe it for a second, of course.

Here we are at the parade. 🙂

The aftermath of the battle leaves everybody dripping with water and slightly muddy.

I’m just always glad that we’re all still friends when the fight’s over. 🙂

Another picture of  the aftermath. This poor garden is always flooded and than trampled to death because of the constant fight to get to the water nozzle which involves much scrabbling, screeching, and bonking on the head with ice cream buckets and other such containers.

Well our grass got the first decent watering it’s had in like forever.

They brought a water tank. No, not kidding. A water tank. Full of water. 

Look closely and you will see what is left of hundreds of water balloons. Our yard will be littered with them for the rest of the summer.

Paige!

We bring something for dinner and then we usually play volleyball until it’s time to go to the fireworks.

Beautiful Lexi. 🙂

I think this was taken in the middle of an argument about who won the water fight. We did of course.

Gracie got some really cool sparkler pictures. We’ve seen similar pictures on various blogs and pinterest and decided to try it.

This is our first attempt and we were pretty pleased with how it turned out actually. 🙂

In this one we were attempting Happy 4th. But there there was some confusion so it didn’t really turn out. It was still fun to try though! Well, Happy 4th everybody! Weeks late. 🙂 Sorry about that, and contrary to the image we may portray in this post we do love all of our friends. Nothing like a little friendly competition, right? 🙂