**4th of July**

I had big plans for this 4th of July, and I mean big ones. I had made one of my trusty lists of all of the things I wanted to make and do for the fourth and was overjoyed when my new friend Haley shared these same desires. Haley is awesome, by the way. If we are lucky she will be starting a blog of her own very soon. She has tons of good stuff to share.

Well, she and I may not have been the very best planners/preparers/time managers for this big shindig we were wanting to do. But we were oblivious to that very important bit of information until it was too late to do anything about it. We took a good three hours shopping around, finding absolutely everything we thought we needed, stopped into Qdoba (best quesadilla I've ever had) and got our lunch to stay, and finally decided to head back to our apartments at like 3:30 in the afternoon. 

We thought we had it all under control. We'd start on our baking, get ourselves all dolled up for the big event and have plenty of time to spare to set everything up before the husbands & co-workers got home from work around 8:30ish. Right?? Wrong. Husbands get off work early, cake pops haven't been dipped, massive rainstorm rolls in and ruins our plans of having the party poolside, not enough raspberries to top all of the cupcakes, and the list goes on and on. 

But after all was said and done, it was a great party. It may not have been everything we were hoping or imagining it would be, but it was fun. Makes me realize that not everything needs to go just exactly how I want it to be. Sometimes when you just go with the flow and don't stress out too much, you end up with the best results. Yeah our cake pops weren't as good as Bakerella's, but they were so dang tasty! The strawberries may not have been dipped to perfection, but they had character. And looking back now, its not the stress that stands out the most in my mind, it really is the feelings that were felt that day and the fun that we all had together.