July 4th

Ok I'm on a blogging roll and since Ella is content watching our dog through the sliding glass door, and I'm trying to wait for the rain to stop before I go to the post office I'll blog about yesterday.  I think Steve and I have done the same thing for the fourth of July the past 8 years, and we figure we've got a good thing going so no surprising tradition changes this year.

We started off the morning by going to the Centerville parade.  Here is Jack in the mad scramble for candy.  He got quite the bag full, thanks to some help from his older cousins.  He was quite competitive about the whole thing and at one point skinned his knee in an attempt to grab a bag of gobstoppers before another kid.

He liked the bands more then I thought he would.  He was tapping his foot along to the music and stood up and danced along.  We may have a future tuba player in our family.

I was surprised by how well Ella did.  I thought she would cry from all the noise, at least in the beginning with all of the firetrucks, but she was perfectly content the whole time.  Afterward we went to Steve's sister's house for breakfast and let the kids play in the water.

In the evening we went with some of my family to a BBQ.  We went to our friend's house who we have had a fourth of July BBQ with almost every year as long as I can remember.  They had this fun slip and slide set up for the kids.  Jack is adventurous.  I love that about him.  The slide was fairly steep and long, but I just took him up to the top and sat him down and he went down without any hesitation and loved it.  He is a little tuffy and only cried for a minute later that night when he somehow upset some wasps and ended up with five stings on his hand and one on his face.  Poor kid!

To top off the evening we went to the Brigham City fireworks.  They are our favorite.  They put on a pretty good show and you can get close without feeling too crowded.  This is Jack's pretend scared face while we were waiting for the lights to go off and the show to start.  Once they started he wasn't too interested and just ran around and played in the dark.  About halfway through he asked me if he could play a game on my phone.  Maybe next year we'll just buy a box of sparklers and light them on our porch :) 

Ella once again put on a brave face and didn't cry at all.  She just watched and occasionally glanced up at me to make sure I was still there and OK with things.  I tried to cover her ears and hope she didn't sustain any permanent hearing loss!  She is such a trooper.  It was a long day for everyone and she was not a complainer.

A final side note.  This is my favorite 2 child purchase.  The back seat wasn't the best for Ella when she was tiny, but I absolutely love it now and have used it a ton lately.  Steve acted like I was trying to buy a BMW when I told him I wanted it, but he even loves it now.  I knew he'd see things my way!