Fabulous 4th!

We had a fabulous 4th of July this year! We started early and took it into the wee hours of 11:30ish. Hey, that's late for us!!! Anyways, it was great! We started off by going to our annual Maple Hills Parade. Our neighborhood does a parade around the streets and it's so fun! Anyone can join in. We made our way over by the park, where it started, without realizing they come right down our street, in front of our house. So, we got to enjoy it twice! By the time we got home they were coming our way again. This meant LOTS of candy being thrown at us! After the parade, our community had a BBQ for the neighborhood. Great fun! We hosted this year's 4th of July with Jeremy's family, which we did last year too and it was great! We thought we'd go with it again this year. This may become a tradition, who knows? I enjoy having everyone over, so it's fine by me. So, after some family time, Jer's family made it to our house around 1:00 and we let the kids swim and we just hung out. Later on we got together with some friends and the guys played a wiffle ball game at the school down the street, while us girls watched the kids and chatted. We headed home and made a delicious BBQ dinner and had some yummy desserts (3 to choose from!), then played around with some fireworks in our driveway. They were little ones, for the kids mainly. After convincing our children that fireworks weren't scary we went to the park, down the street, to watch the main event. The "main event" consists of everyone in the neighborhood bringing their fireworks to the field and letting them off there. It's a pretty crazy thing, actually. Very loud, and can be a little dangerous. Collin got to stay home with Grandma Klein. There's no way we would bring such a little guy! Thanks Sharon for volunteering to stay with him!!! We always just sit on the sidelines and watch everyone else do their thing. We have one guy in the neighborhood who owns a firework stand, and he puts on quite a show. Everyone goes to see his stuff, pretty much. It's awesome! It's so loud though, my kids have to have their earmuffs. Ya know, the kind you do yard work in and stuff? Not the kind you play in the snow in :) It's really fun! I'm so glad we live in such a great area! The community is awesome and so united! I'm so thankful for our country and it's freedoms. We are so blessed to live here and have all that we do!