I have been kind of nervous about Independence day this year. With most of Utah ablaze lately, it seemed very dangerous to be having fireworks on the 4th of July. First thing in the morning I went shopping to see if I could find a patriotic dress for Lydia to wear, and to find a patriotic shirt for Ethan. All the other girls had dresses from previous years to wear, so we didn’t feel a need to buy them new ones for this year. When I got back we got everyone all dressed up in their Independence day clothes. While we sat around waiting to hear what the plan was for Karen’s birthday, (which is also today) I made the girls some red, white and blue flower hair bows.
To celebrate Karen’s birthday this year we all went out to lunch at Rib City. Kyle had told her that he didn’t want to be away from home for too long and that we definitely wanted to be back before anybody started setting off fireworks so that we could water our lawn so that it couldn’t accidentally catch fire. She was totally fine with that, and so we met for lunch. Laurel invited us to go over to her place afterward, but we REALLY wanted to be home with plenty of time to prep our yard.
We came home and made our traditional homemade ice cream. This year we made vanilla. And we sat down to watch 1776. Debby and Jeff came over in the evening to have dinner and watch fireworks with us. This year, instead of buying any of our own fireworks, we just walked to the end of the street to watch the neighborhood collection of fireworks. They did this last year and called it the “Dead-end of Fire” (because they live right next to a dead end in the road), and it was such a success that they decided to do it again this year.
The kids had a good time being on the corner watching all the fireworks. Although we had several occurrences of kids going missing. Tyra kept going across the street with her friends without saying anything. Ethan did once as well. Dinah ran across the street and just went into our neighbors house without knocking or anything, and I went over to bring her back and she straightaway went into another of our neighbors houses without knocking or anything. I collected her and told her that if she ran off anymore I would be taking her back home!
I loved watching Lydia watch the fireworks though:
Chloe really didn’t like the loud fireworks:
I love how she has Debby covering her ears for her. 🙂
In general though, the kids did a pretty good job of sitting on the curb to watch the show:
Then when the fireworks were all over, we came back to the house and ate our yummy homemade ice cream!