Summer Soiree

A couple weekends ago we had a party for all of Eric's employees in our backyard for a bit of an end of summer bash. Eric has hired a lot of new employees over the past 6 months so we thought it would be fun to have a big family for us to get to know all the new wives and families as well as hang out with all of the work families we already know and love. I have actually been having it in the works since May (but since summer was so busy we didn't schedule it until August.) I wanted to go with the "semi trendy" carnival theme and it was too much fun to plan. Tried to keep it around the fun colors, red, white, yellow and tiffany blue, and kind of make it more of the old fashioned carnival look. Don't these colors just make you happy?

{the invite}

I am loving doing the custom Jones soda wrappers for everything lately. Eric has a little contest at the office with a "surprise" for the 8 winners. They were the ones who were featured on the Jones sodas for the party.

Since Eric's employee count has gone up, it's getting harder and harder for us to do all the food prep so for this party, so I used {and am now in love with} the fan-tabulous caterers Culinary Crafts. Holy smokes, their food was amazing, they were so great to work with, and the servers etc were so nice and so helpful. And aren't they cute that they wore ties to match the tiffany blue colors we used.

The food was even better than it looked and I loved the great punch, berry bongo and lemonade bar they did. They were so great at making everything I wanted happen with the food. We tried to stick with the "fair food" theme. They grilled up hot dogs and gourmet burgers with every topping you could imagine, we also had pasta salad, roasted potatoes, french fries in parchment cones, fresh fruit, salsa bar. Delish!

We also did an old fashioned candy bar... remember some of these candies?? Oldies but goodies! Also we had a sundae bar with tons of ice cream topping and cotton candy.

Right along with the carnival idea, I had the great face painter I used at Ady's birthday party come to do face painting and she brought a balloon twisting sidekick which the kids loved. We also had a couple other fun carnival games for the tons of kids who came.

{the carousel animals made for both cute decor as well as great picture spots for the kiddos... and adults who act like kiddos}

The week before the party, we had Eric's loan officers vote on who got to dunk Eric in the dunk tank, as well as nominations for who the LO's wanted to get to dunk and who the girls in the office wanted to dunk.

Most of the kids swam and fountain played too. Then the daddies started a belly flop and diving contest. Eric works with the most competitive guys ever. Everything always ends up being a contest.

Eric and I kept stealing the microphone for from the DJ and emcee-ing for ourselves, we gave out some fun raffle prizes who got donated from Skullcandy and some other fun places.

But the best part of the party, was spending time with all the great people who came. Eric is so lucky to have such great employees who we love to hang out with.

And our favorite local photographer and our friend Ashlee Raubach was hires to do all the pics for the evening {including all these I posted} and she also set up a little photo booth so we could get some fun group shots and family shots of everyone.

I know this blog post was so long but this party was so much fun and I loved getting totally into the carnnival. Thanks everyone who came!

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