The 4th

I woke up Wednesday not feeling too awful, so I decided we should do the parade.  Matt was at work, but Gran said she’d come with us!

Joanna hasn’t been to the 4th of July parade since she was a toddler, and I was telling her we needed to pick out red, white, and/or blue clothes to wear.  When she found out Gran was coming she asked, “Does she know what color to wear?”  I thought that was cute. :)

Before leaving I took pics of the kids on the driveway.

We got there probably by 9:30, but the shady spots had already been snatched.  My mom had this big ol’ beach umbrella so we thought we’d be okay in the full sun.

At first we had it kind of set up behind us for a little shady spot for the kids before the parade started.

This girl looks chilled out!

These kids are sooooo cute!

James gets sooooo hot.

I think we should move the 4th of July parade to January.  Anybody with me?  :)

David came by on his bicycle to watch the parade with us.  He rigged the big umbrella to stand up over us using the stroller so we could sit/stand under it and watch the parade.  Yay!!

We would not have made it through whole parade without that umbrella.  I might not have lasted five minutes.  I don’t mix well with heat.

These guys played “Oh When the Saints…”  I love live music!

James LOVED waving his American flag – he did it the whole parade!

My sweet Joanna…

We drank lots of water, and the kids enjoyed those ice pops they passed out in the parade.

Yum!

I even let James have a sucker when he got antsy later – he sucked that thing until it was totally gone.  :)

More live music – a bagpipe!  I find bagpipes to be amazing.  They look really hard to play.

Joanna is cute.

Somehow she ended up with this sign from I’m assuming Ted Cruz’ people in the parade.  She’s hilarious.

This man dressed as Uncle Sam lives around the corner form us.  We always wondered why he wore his hair and beard like that.  Now we know.

Our loot! 

It was kind of hard to completely pass on the candy.  There were a couple of favorites in there.  But I didn’t eat any!

I was definitely feeling the heat and some grodiness when we left, but I’m glad we went.  The kids had a great time, and it’s so fun to see so many people out all enjoying the parade.  Mom stopped on the way home to get the kids Happy Meals, and I’m so glad she did.  I ended up feeling really awful later on, and I was glad all the “cooking” I had to do for lunch was put stuff on plates.  The children really enjoyed the treat as well!  I’m very thankful that James took a good nap and Matt was able to get home a few minutes early.  I just can’t shake this icky feeling!

We didn’t do anything festive for the evening of the 4th.  It’s was still so stinkin’ hot of course, but beyond that it’s hard to keep the kids up late.  It won’t be too many years before we head out to watch fireworks though!  The children got to sleep about the normal time and slept through what we can hear of the big display and miscellaneous other fireworks.  Much later, I had just fallen asleep when the neighbors started shooting off fireworks in the cul-du-sac.  I admit, I did go out and ask them to stop {which they did}.  I need sleep!  And it was after 11; that seems late to me.  Not to mention you aren’t supposed to shoot off fireworks in Kingwood.  I still feel a little like an Independence Day Scrooge though.  :)