It's Independence Day!

Due to some craziness with our landlady and next year's rental contract, we are having to move.  We have been looking at houses and thought we missed out on the one that we liked the best.  While we were looking at it, our realtor (and good friend) texted the listing agent to find out more and found that they'd just accepted an offer.  However, it fell through a couple days later and we jumped on it.  All looks well so far and we are pending contract as I write this which is quite a bit later than the actual July 4th.  So we went into full packing mode the week after the Fourth.

The day before the holiday, my sweet boy Bob, AKA the Flash, brought me Peter Rabbit and asked me to read to him right after I'd laid down for a tiny break.  How can one resist the Flash such a request?!

Brian used our ice cream maker to  make us cookies and cream home-made ice cream in the afternoon of the 4th of July.  We all got very small portions as the electric machine isn't built for big families.

Brian smoked some ribs and we had chilli dogs too since we didn't have quite enough ribs to go around as a main course for everyone.

After dinner, my brother's family came over for roasting marshmallows and making s'mores.  This didn't turn out so great because it's so HOT here, but we were trying to burn some of our built up brush that wouldn't fit in our compost bin since we are moving soon.  Let's just say it was short lived.

Then we moved to the front yard and did our own fireworks.  No big fireworks shows this year, because...corona.  We didn't let it get us down, we made our own fun and the rest of the neighborhood did as well.  We are outside the city limits and so completely in our legal rights to do our own fireworks.  

It started out in the light of the evening and with all children happy and excited...

Someone *may* have went overboard in buying fireworks.

Every child held sparklers (Secret:  I never have held a sparkler!)...

Still smiling...

And then somewhere early on in the evening, a Saturn something or other shot some fireworks between a few children and the two littlest boys, Bob and Turner never fully recovered.

At some point in hopes of coaxing out their cousin, one of my boys got the noise cancelling headset for Turner so he'd come back out of the house and watch the neighborhood shows.