The Rambles of a Mommy: Good Neighbor Days

This was a few weeks ago but Ryan reminded me that I hadn't shared anything from Good Neighbor Days. It's a weekend celebration for our little town ... a parade and fireworks on Friday night followed by a carnival, car show, etc. It's a great time!

Friday night we had a small get together at our house. We walked up to the parade with my sister and her family, Ryan's sister and her family and our next door neighbors. For the size of our little town, I was quite impressed with it's size. Unfortunally for Riley and the other kids, our neighborhood is towards the end of the parade route, so they *only* got half of a gallon ziplock bag of candy each.

After the parade, we went back to our house where we started a fire, burnt some popcorn, discovered the yummy-ness of mixing some of the root beer keg with Bailey's Irish Cream (try it if you've never had it!), played giant Wii (it was projected against the outside of our house ... lifesize) and finally watched the fireworks overhead.

Saturday was an early morning as the jump house that a bunch of the neighborhood had gone together to rent was delivered at about 7:15. By 7:30 kids were already jumping. :) The best part though? We'd upgraded the size and now the adults could get in too. :)

We had a great day with our neighbors. We had the jump house, a couple swimming pools, a blow-up waterslide, lots of root beer for the kids and plenty of adult beverages for the others. The weather tried to cut into the yummy potluck dinner we had planned but we managed to finish just before it started to rain.

Another bonus to the day ... Steve, Charina, Grace and Jack ... old neighbors and GREAT friends of ours came to visit. Charina and I are making plans for Riley and Grace to marry someday ... so it was good that they could see each other again. (And the funniest part of the weekend? Grace told Riley that she loved him. Riley's reaction was one I've never seen from him before ... he was speechless and actually turned red. Ha ha)

I think every single kid went to bed pretty early that night. I know Riley was exhausted beyond belief. It was fun to watch all the kids run around because 6 years ago only about 2 or 3 of these kids were even born. Most of us moved into the neighborhood as newlyweds ... and that Saturday we had about 15 kids running around. We're a fertile group to say the least. :)

Picture time.

First of all, I have to show these two pictures. This is Grace and Paige last September when we went to stay with Steve and Charina one weekend.