Becky Beck - July - Neighborhood Party

My July project changed from whatever it was supposed to be (I can't remember) to heading up our big Summer Neighborhood Picnic.  Our poor Bishop couldn't get anyone to be in charge of it.  I felt bad for him and volunteered--knowing I could make it my July project made it a little less painful.  I have never, ever done anything like this before.  I can't stand making cutesy decoration stuff and I can't even figure out how to make enough food to feed the 8 of us who are at home--I usually end up making too much.  So to plan for between 200-250 was overwhelming.

Table decorations/functional fork holders.

I may not be a decorator but I am a pretty good planner and delegator and those skills served me well.

My daughter found this idea for centerpieces (we attached balloons to the jars) on Pinterest and I found a recipe for Kool-Aid popcorn online.

I kept the menu simple

Pulled pork sandwiches (they were AWESOME!  we had several people in the neighborhood smoke the pork)

Hot dogs for the kids

Baked Beans

Pasta Salad

Watermelon

Chips

And for dessert dutch oven cobblers with ice cream and chocolate chip cookies and ice cream for the kids.

Picked up these on clearance at the Walmart.

(That's my daughter Emmy helping out)

Several of the guys that were supposed to set up didn't show so my husband and son were troopers and helped out all afternoon.  I explained to the guy in charge of set up that people are flaky (and I say that with love) and he should have called them all to remind them the day before.

My awesome kitchen crew.

My girls play the violin with another group of kids so they played all kinds of fun fiddle and country songs!  One of the favorites was Devil Went Down to Georgia.

We have one neighbor who has this fun train she always lets us use and another neighbor who has a bouncy house.

My neighbor Marsha is an artist and she did incredible face painting...

This was a big project for sure.

I started working on things the 3rd week in June and the party was on July 26th.

I enlisted many of my neighbors to help and they were awesome!  A few took care of the invitations, one took care of the sign up sheets and kept track of all the money and who was bringing what.  Another was in charge of assigning people to make the dutch oven desserts.  Another took care of the advertising.

My busiest day was the day of the party.  I got to work around noon getting things ready and didn't stop until around 9:00pm.  Overall I'm happy with the results.  We had about 225 people attend.  We really tried to include all of our neighbors with personal invites.  I live in an fantastic neighborhood and I wanted the people who don't attend our ward to feel welcome.  We had neighbors of many different faiths come so I was really happy about that.  And, we didn't run out of food!  We probably could have served another 150 people, no problem.

I can definitely see the benefit of having a committee to work with.  I didn't have one but I would should I ever do something like this again.