Our First Stateside 4th

Another out-of-date post, but oh well!! I'm trying to catch up! : )

After being out of the country for 7 years, we were really looking forward to celebrating the 4th of July in the US this year! Joel preached at church that morning. His parents were still with us, so it was wonderful to sit in church with them as well as his brother's family. It's been absolutely wonderful to be around family again!!

After church, Joel's parents headed to Jon & Erin's for the week, so the kids, Joel & I headed home for a BBQ! It felt funny to have an overcast 4th of July and still be sitting outside BBQing. : ) Abigail and I were both cold in our sundresses and had to go in and get some leggings to put on underneath! : )

Joel had visited the Campbell's fireworks stand and came home with just a few fireworks for the kids to watch. We were planning on heading over to the Wilson's for the 4th of July party with families from church, so we just did a few here at the house for the kids to get used to them.



I really like this succession of photos that show Abigail's response to the fireworks. Caleb was completely frightened by the bouncing ground blooms or whatever they were. Elijah enjoyed them...thought they were funny. I think he could relate to them, the bouncing ball of energy.

At the Wilson's, Abigail enjoyed holding her first "sparklers". Elijah wasn't feeling very well and spent most of his time just sitting on the curb. He tolerated his first sparkler, but then declared, "I don wike fiyiwooks" when it got too smoky for him. Both kids enjoyed being with the other kids and watching the fireworks from the safety of the curb.

I really liked the safety squares that one of the Dad's did for the kids when they were all doing their sparklers! Pretty smart!

The kids were getting pretty tired, so around 9 o'clock, we headed home. As we drove home from Sandy, we could see fireworks from the van and the kids just kept saying, "look at that one, look at that one!" So when we got home and saw that the we could see many, many fireworks from our deck we asked the kids if they wanted to watch with us. They watched for about 3 minutes and then both of them asked to go to bed!!! It was a complete first in our house! We just laughed as we put them to bed!

After that, Joel and I headed out to our special bench on the deck, wrapped up in blankets and watched all the fireworks our eyes could take in. After about 45 minutes we realized there wasn't going to be any "grand finale" to end the show, they would just keep going and going and we were getting tired, so we headed to bed as well! All in all, it was a very enjoyable 4th of July for our family this year!!