Back to Warmth... Back to School BBQ

I have to go back to Labor Day!  I'm sorry, but I know I'll never scrapbook these photos and I want to share the printables that I made with you!

This is my one time of year to host a big gathering.  I don't have a ton of house space, and since I want to have many people over, and all of those people have many children, the only place for us to go is outside!  Labor Day is my party day!

I started with these invites created by me...

Just a few days prior to this we had our little lady party at Tara's.  The bees were out in full force, like scary full force.  I realize now that I didn't blog about this, which is fine because I scrapped it!  I'll just share that real quick (hope none of my girlfriends hate me for posting this... lmk if you want me to take it down!)!  Anyway, the bee's had me all nervous for my upcoming gathering...  We ended up taking all the food in at Tara's, don't want to do that at my house!  What will we do?

I went into ninja mode! 

Seriously, I was looking things up, trying to attract bees so I could test how to best repel them!  I put up dryer sheets.  I made those bee traps out of plastic bottles, I set out meat, sugar water, lemon, all sorts of things to see what attracted most!  It was serious business!  After testing all morning I realized that the traps don't work all that well and bees like sugar water, but not if they have to crawl into a trap to get it!  When I dumped it out by the tree, they all hoarded around that, sweet thing was the tree was right next to where I planned to put the food!

After some serious push back from the husband I decided to just go with it and hope the bees didn't show, despite putting out drinks and food, because what is a party w/o that? 

My last ditch effort was the whole cloves, which bees apparently don't like the smell of.  Husband was sent to buy that!

For future reference THE CLOVES TOTALLY WORK!!!  I think we saw 1 bee near the food!  The smell was strong, but it didn't bother any of us humans!  I sprinkled cloves all over the food table and on the kids' tables, and the drink table... money!  Lest you forget, earlier that day I was the bee whisperer and our yard was a buzz with the bees!  100% CONVINCED! 

Now for the fun stuff. I created a back to school area, for the kids, since their first day was the following day. Here is a peek of that...

The plan was for each of them to put their treasures into their brown bag to take home with them.  Or just eat them now, that's fine!  They were a hit! 

Now please don't mind our dirty, brown, sorry excuse for grass!  It has since come back to life, now that water has been reintroduced to it's diet!

Here is a closer look at the 'messages' to the kids.  Feel free to print these off for yourselves.  4x6 should work just fine w/ these files on here.

I put this with some gum crayons I found at the dollar store.

A pack of cookies of course!

You could do 'extra' gum.  I did these extreme sour patch strings.

Pencils for all!

 Blow pops.

I also chopped these up for everyone.  It's a good little reminder!

We all had a great time!  The food was wonderful!  I love when my guests bring lovely things I've never tasted!  Jamie has been killing it with the salads this year!  Every event she brings a new one and I've loved every one!  Eliza did this watermelon salsa, crazy good!  Jessica did a new one that was delicious, although I can't remember what is was now!  Super good food!

I had filled water balloons and we launched them.  This year we had the kids try to catch them with towels instead of hands, that helped minimize injury!  I think the big boys had more fun launching of course! 

Brad fixed my tree swing.  Matt manned the grill.  There were some water wars.  We played a few games, parents visited, kids played, we ate, were loud.   I loved it so much!  It was a success and I was so glad everyone could come.  Someday I'll have a larger house where I can do this more often!!!  Oh how I love to entertain!