Fantastic Fourth

Our 4th of July was pretty crazy, but of course a lot of fun. This balloon is a great example of that, as it landed right in my parents neighborhood very unexpectedly.

Steve wanted to run bandit for the Freedom 10k run. For those who aren't familiar with the term "running bandit", it means running a race without registering for it. He wanted to be a real bandit, so of course he was. He did really well and kept going the whole way, but he was dead tired afterwards. I was pretty tired too, because we had to wake up super early.

Some of my siblings and cousins slept overnight on the street to save us a spot on the parade route. I met up with them in the morning and painted some of their faces. Here are the results below. It was my first attempt face painting, so taking that into consideration I think I did pretty good. Everyone wanted something patriotic except for Noah, who is at the bottom of the picture below. He wanted spiderman. But I couldn't do spiderman, so then he had me paint eyeballs on his face and on his eyelids like Jack Sparrow from the 2nd pirates movie. Funny boy :)

After the parade we had to go do a puppet performance with Curtis. We were already very worn out from the morning, but we managed to pull energy from nowhere and put on a pretty good show. Thanks Dez for taking the pictures.

We performed our Frog Prince show, and at the end we had some girls, who happened to be beauty pageant winners and wearing crowns, come and kiss the frog. They were more than eager, but alas, that frog was no prince.

For that evening Lafe headed up a fantastic bbq. Steve and I collapsed with exahaustion afterwards and slept. Then my cousins came and wanted to play. Noah gave Steve a walkie talkie to use and Steve sent Noah on secret missions throughout the house. Noah loved it.

For the evening, we made some scrumptious treats that I got from familyfun.com. Heather and Sage made these fabulous statue of liberty cupcake torches (though they were supposed to be green ice cream cones. I couldn't find any at the store)

I dipped some strawberries in white chocolate and pretty blue sprinkles for a fabulous looking red white and blue treat. I love Family Fun!

My parents live right across the street from the Stadium, so we had great seats to see the fireworks. We also had to put up with traffic though, but it was worth it. We got some little fireworks to play with, then we watched the real deal.

Not the most flattering picture for me, but I was pretty dead by this time. Steve was too, but you can't even tell in the picture. After that was over, we collapsed with exhaustion again and had to wait a long time for traffic to clear up so we could get home. It felt like 3 days jam packed in one, but that's how we enjoy holidays. Thanks mom and dad for taking most of these pictures.