Fourth Fun!

I absolutely ADORE the 4th of July!

It's one of my favorite holidays. I consider myself patriotic and I feel extremely blessed to have been born in America.

I especially love the small town celebrations and parades. They have such a wonderful feel to them. There's one town I love to go to and it's been a couple of years since we made it over there, so I was so excited to go this year.

They have a parade where everyone gets involved... there are the mayor and people like that in the cool classic cars.

Of course, the homemade floats are always fun. Like this boat

Or the Boy Scouts 100th anniversary float

Then there are the historical societies and marching bands...

I love the little old men and their swing music. They're there every year.

More floats - a flying eagle!

And a dragon. A number of the floats had people armed with water guns that they tried to douse the crowd with.

This cool milk truck had a horn that sounded like a cow! It was the most amazing thing evar! I so want a horn like that!

These girls were SO cute - the tumblers on the first float doing flips and somersaults and handsprings WHILE the float was MOVING! so talented!

And these wee ones on the bar... so very ADORABLE!

As it got dark I pulled out the glow sticks that I had bought earlier this week. It's amazing how much fun you can have with a 15 pack of glow sticks. I got a bunch of tubes of them so we could each have one. You should have seen how excited Mom got when I told her the whole tube was for her. Even Dad got into it and we were having WAY too much fun. Dad would crack two different colors just on the end and hold them up so the light would slowly spread to see which moved faster. If you crack them a little bit at a time you can see the chemical reaction and it almost looks like something out of a Harry Potter movie or something - all this smokey light waving around on its own.

I made a halo 0:)

And bracelets

And a chain that Naomi had fun playing with :D

Then the fireworks started. They always put on a stellar show and play patriotic music in the background. It's so great. I love a good fireworks show. I actually got some pretty good pictures...

And here's a video of the Grand Finale! I can't tell if it's working or not, so if it isn't, my apologies and I'll try to fix it tomorrow. Or later today, actually.

I'm still going to be doing Day 1 of my BEA Bonanza! So check back later for the first day's giveaway!