4th of July

Where in the world did June go? This summer is flying by! We're still plugging away on the end of our school year, but there's finally a light at the end of the tunnel. Landon, Sierra, and Cheyenne have finished their math books, Sierra just finished Language Arts, Landon has two days left of reading, and Dakota has just about 4 days left in her math book. We officially still have 28 days left that we'll be filling with science and history along with some reading and math games.

Our 4th of July celebration was a little different this year. Daniel found out on Saturday that he was going to be leaving Sunday evening on a two week trip for work. (He ended up only being gone 5 days! Yea!) Since he wouldn't be here on the 4th, we celebrated with him on Saturday night.

We started with a trip to the fireworks stand. The kids had fun picking out their own little bagful of fireworks. It was funny to see their different personalities when it comes to spending money. A couple of them went through and bought whatever they saw that looked cool until their money was gone and a couple of them worked really hard to get as much as they could for their money. They all ended up with some pretty cool stuff.

We came home and hung out a while until it started to cool off a little. Daniel fired up the grill and cooked us some yummy hot dogs for dinner. While we were waiting for dinner, we played with a few of the daytime fireworks. 

We did some snakes,

 sent up some satellites,

(boots and shorts-he dressed himself!)

ran through some smoke bombs,

and made a huge streamer mess with party poppers.

After dinner and dishes it was dark enough for the fun stuff.

I took about a million pictures of the kids playing with sparklers. Here are a few of my favorites.

I love this picture of Sierra!

Sunday morning, we all went to church. It was the first time in a really long time that Daniel's been able to go with us, so it was extra special. After church, we went to Grandma Debbie's house for lunch and homemade ice cream. We hung out there until it was time to drop Daniel off for his trip. 

On Wednesday, we started our celebration with some "fireworks" pancakes. Yum!

I'm trying to get us through these last few weeks of school as soon as possible, so I didn't want to miss a day for the holiday. We did a 4th of July version of our school day. We spent most of the day watching a documentary about the Revolution and talking about it. Then, we did some 4th of July worksheets and coloring pages and watched a video of God Bless America on Youtube.

At lunch time, I tried a version of the red, white, and blue drink I've been seeing all over Pinterest . I used slightly different ingredients, so mine didn't turn out quite as cool as the examples, but they weren't bad. Cheyenne told me they tasted like gummy worms. Mmmmmm!

Here's a version without the red.

That evening, we headed out with Grandma Debbie to watch the fireworks at the fairgrounds. It was crazy because we somehow missed the memo that they were changing the location of where they were going to set the fireworks off. For years, they have set them up on the softball fields to the west of the expo center, so we were all set up to watch them there. When it got dark, there were fireworks going off behind us. It's not unusual for people to bring their own fireworks and set them off while they're waiting for the big show, so we didn't really pay attention the them for the first few minutes. We finally realized that they weren't stopping and figured out what had happened. We missed the first 5 or so minutes (well, I think the kids actually were watching them, just the adults missed them) but the rest of the show was great!

When the fireworks were over, all the kids loaded up with Grandma Debbie to spend the night at her house and I went home to a very quiet house.

We missed Daniel a lot, but we had a pretty good day. 

What kinds of fun things did you do with your family for the 4th?

I hope everyone had a fun and safe holiday!