Saturday, July 12, 2008

July 4th & the "sprinklers" and "ear pads"

We had a fun July 4th! I just keep not having time to write this down (I have a severe problem with needing to be too chronological in my thought processing so I get farther behind!). But, way back on July 4th, we had a blast of a day. For lunch, we went to Oma and Pop-pop's house for some fun time with friends - Beca met 15 month old Riley who liked to hug and knocked Beca over a few times - all in good fun! Oma's Dana (that's really what Beca calls her) and Dana's Wendy went out and got Beca giggling on the swings for a while even though it was muggy out! It was so sweet!
Beca asked Oma if she could stay at her house for the afternoon and since Mommy and Daddy both needed naps, we said sure! Well, after Oma said it was ok!
We all met up at the Long's house - an old scouting family that are great friends and tons of fun! All 3 boys went through Dad's troop and Dad and Jim are just big kids together. And the one day of the year they definitely don't think straight is July 4th. Since it is light out for a while, we have several hours of mixing chemicals and making plastic bottles blow up. While most of us think it is cool (dude - it's chemicals exploding plastic!), Beca hates it - well, the noise it makes. She would panic and run inside. Until she found "ear pads" - then she didn't want to be without them! We finally convinced her that they had stopped with the noise for a while and that she could do sparklers. She had fun and got singed a couple of times when she didn't hold it out quite right. Whenever somebody said "hold your arm out straight", Beca would thrust both arms straight out. She had so much fun, she even did 2 sparklers at once! Thanks to Maddie and Liz (the Longs granddaughters) for helping Beca light her sparklers!
The rest of the night was interesting - Beca sprinted inside when the guys started lighting off the real fireworks - yes, in a neighborhood and they even had stands to angle and fire the rockets. Good thing the neighbors were out. It was fun to watch until the lightning started answering back. The big fireworks got put away before they even were lit. And then the sky fell out. Poor Maddie and Liz had never really been in a thunderstorm since they are from Washington State and the thunder was so loud, it even scared some of the adults. We attempted to wait it out and watch the Capital Fourth program from Washington DC but Beca was getting very tired. The first three in the car were Beca, my Mom and my Dad. Beca told them that they were going to drop Mommy and Daddy off at their house and then she would get to go with them to sleep at their house. My Dad made her repeat it for Mom again and this time she said it and added "right, Oma?" at the end. She ended up there the next night after playing at Kate's house with Kate and Payton. It was a really fun weekend and I really wish all weekends were 3 day.

No comments: