Good things come to those who wait.

Well.

If that’s true, why did I just get eaten alive by a tribe of vicious fire ants?

Let me backtrack a moment.

Four years ago, we started a new tradition after moving to No Man’s Land.

My boys wanted to do something epic to celebrate surviving their first chaotic school year here.

With a crazy housing market at the time, we made a major move without being sure where we’d be living, where the kids would go to school, or if I would be homeschooling them…

And this was a mere three weeks before school was set to start.

Yeesh.

But all the pieces eventually fell into place.

And we survived.

So we celebrated.

My older son had enjoyed watching his New England Patriots get doused in massive buckets filled with freakishly neon Gatorade to celebrate their Super Bowl victory earlier that year.

My boys wanted to celebrate their victory of surviving the school year.

And so a new tradition was born.

Every year for the last three years, we did our Gatorade Victory Shower on the last day of school.

Except this year.

It rained heavily and the wind howled like a banshee.

So we decided our celebration could, and probably should, wait a day or two.

Or, you know, five weeks.

Yeah.

First, we inadvertently “floated” my birthday back in April when my husband was out of town for work, with the intention of celebrating that weekend.

And celebrate we did.

Almost a month later.

When I’d practically forgotten about it myself.

Life has a way of keeping us busy, overwhelmed, and overloaded.

But at least we finally got out and enjoyed dinner and drinks.

And an impromptu trip to Toys R Us.

(For the record, I will ALWAYS be a Toys R Us kid. Today is a sad, sad day.)

But anyway, back to our floated Gatorade Shower.

Days passed.

Then weeks.

And then I had a thought.

Maybe we would do the shower for my son’s 13th birthday!

But no.

We’d missed out on that, too.

Maybe we should’ve just started a new tradition with a Back to School Gatorade shower!

But I wanted to do it this summer.

We weren’t moving very fast, though.

We’d keep drinking from our stash of Gatorade.

We’d keep replacing them.

The cycle continued.

Just in case we ever got around to doing the shower.

Which we finally did.

Today!

This morning, I gathered all the Gatorade bottles.

And the Nerf Super Soaker water guns.

Which are great…

Unless your child is gleefully spraying you in the face.

I even splurged on those self-sealing balloons so I wouldn’t spend 30 minutes trying to make and tie a whopping 10 water balloons.

3 easy steps Bunch o Balloons!

None of the steps of which involve me actually reading the directions, it would seem.

The first batch of balloons didn’t go over all that well.

I hadn’t realized they needed to be in water.

Like a fish.

Otherwise, you pretty much get the same end result.

We’d been so ready for this shower for five weeks.

Except not really ready.

Until today.

I can’t be certain, but we might’ve just unintentionally celebrated my older son’s last day of Drivers Ed.

Oh well.

At least we finally had our celebration.

And aside from a few WWE-like moments with flying Gatorade bottles, a good time was had by all.

Until those evil fire ants came along…

~Happy Friday, friends! Have a great weekend!~