4th of July

I sure do love the 4th of July. We started out our day with the traditional neighborhood bike parade. Benson is learning to "pose" for pictures, and it cracks me up every time. And you wouldn't know it by the picture, but Richie had lost all of his patience by this point. :) helping kids get up early, get bikes decorated etc all entails some stress. But everyone is smiling for the picture, so we'll call it a win! Unfortunately the bike parade started earlier than they were supposed to, and Taysom and I ended up missing a lot of it. But we all enjoyed a pancake breakfast together as a neighborhood afterward.



We came home and chilled. Benson and I filled up 60 water balloons to use later. Then I left them out in the sun, and they all popped except 5. So there's that. Then we were getting a bit bored, so we forced the kids out in the heat to play whiffle ball. When we got too hot, we retreated inside to watch "The Sandlot". Later that night, we had Taysom, Tucker and Belen, Ilah and John here for dinner. It made everything a bit more festive to have family with us.


After dinner, we did smores out back and played Mexican horse-shoes. When the shade covered the front yard, we got in some more whiffle ball, and then came inside to play a card game until it got dark outside. It's called "take your pick" and my favorite part of the day was probably listening to Lindy play it. She couldn't read the choices on the cards, so she'd just make up choices for people to pick from. "Hair, or eyebrows?" "Forks or spoons?" "Hands or teeth?" :)


Once it got dark enough we went outside to do pop-it's and sparklers. Our neighbors had lit off their mega fireworks show the night before, but most of us still got a pretty good show up on the roof watching fireworks go off all around the city. Benson was absolutely terrified of the fireworks. On the 3rd when we tried to watch our neighbors, I think we scarred him. None of my kids have ever been that scared, and it took until early 11pm to calm him down. So on the 4th, I tried to put him to sleep before all the big fireworks started going off, but he was literally mumbling "fireworks" in his fitful sleep. Poor Kid.