Celebrating our Independance and a Six Month Old Baby

Note:  Bring your cheese, because I have a ton of whine with this post...

The 4th of July has been one of my favorite holidays for as long as I can remember. Both what we are celebrating and how we celebrate are such awesome things.  Being married to a military man and having a military brother (coming home from his 2nd Iraq tour soon!) has made it mean even more. 

When we lived in Nebraska from 2002-2008, it moved up the list even more.  Nebraskans really know how to celebrate the 4th.  Like an awesome, amazing, everyone spends a ton of money on fireworks and the 4th is not just on the 4th, but also the two weeks before the 4th as well, fireworks everywhere, HUGE deal. Driving home from our friend's house every 4th at about midnight was about as beautiful as you can imagine, like a fireworks show over the whole city.

And no offense to Texans, but it's just not the same down here.

In Texas' defense, our first 4th here, last summer, there was a serious drought and fireworks probably would have caused some bad fires. But this year, there was no drought. In fact, we were worried that Hurricane Alex's outer rain bands would take away our July 4th fun, but lucky for us, they were far away by the 3rd of July. (sorry to whoever did get them on the 4th!)

Chris and the boys went and bought a big paper grocery sack full of fireworks to set off in the street, which is how people in Nebraska did it, and how we expected people would do it since it wasn't too dry. Ummm, no. (crickets chirping) We were out there for only a few days leading up to the 4th, and always during daylight since the boys' bedtime came before it got dark, and we heard no one else having fun with their own fireworks on any day or night leading up to the 4th. Granted, the house behind ours is when the city line of Schertz begins and they are actually illegal in that city. (Sheesh, those city leaders must be happening folks.)

So it felt a little out of place to be setting our fireworks off, but the boys would not be deterred from lighting fire tanks pointed at other tanks and plastic army men, smoke bombs by the dozen, and Black Cat fire cracker things that don't serve any purpose other than to make lots of loud pops. I personally like the ones that make pretty colors better.

No one ever complained to us about setting our stuff off and we didn't get any visits from the police, so we figured we were okay.

After church on Sunday the 4th, we had friends over for a lunch BBQ and then we all went to the Air Force base's July 4th celebration. The one at the base in Nebraska was so fun and had lots of fun games and things for the kids to do...fishing, coin hunts, pony rides, paddle boats, bounce houses, clowns, live music, playgrounds, and it was only for military, so while there were a lot of people, it was different than the "lot of people" that we experienced at the Texas military July 4th celebration.

I'm talking thousands of people that were there on this July 4th. For some reason, they opened the celebration to the public and thousands crowded onto the hot, cement flight line (runway) in JULY. They had live music, and it was great, but we were sitting in a crowd of thousands on a runway in a Texas July. They did have bounce houses and I saw a basketball game being played in one area, but as we were walking in to find a spot, we saw that the lines for everything were at least a half hour long. Did I mention everything was on a runway? No trees or shade of any kind (except the umbrella that I was lucky enough to remember to bring in to shade Anna).

We thought we'd wait and see if the lines got shorter to do the fun stuff. Nope. A friend of ours said they waited in line for a bounce house for ONE HOUR. There was also many food vendors set up, which we were planning on getting our dinner from. The lines for those, and there were a lot, about 20 or so, stretched halfway into the crowd of people and I'm sure the wait was close to an hour for those as well. About a half hour before fireworks started, I took the kids to stand in line for the portapotties. We watched the first five minutes of fireworks still in line to use the potty; that's how long it took. I'm glad they didn't have to go too bad or they'd all have wet pants! If we hadn't been there with friends, we'd have left a long time ago.

It wasn't totally miserable the whole time though, if that's how it's sounded so far. It was fun just to sit and chat with our friends. The kids had fun playing with their friends as well. Chris brought some glow bracelets that the kids had a ton of fun with when it got dark. I think we would have gone insane without them.

And the fireworks show was really good. Leah got scared when it started, but as long as she was being held, she liked it and kept laughing at the sky lighting up. Anna slept in her daddy's arms the whole time.

It then took forever to drive the mile, maybe two, to get off base. Forever being about 20 or 30 minutes. By the time we got home, it was about 11:15 but we still had the rest of our fireworks to set off in the street. (We did hear a few others lighting theirs also in our neighborhood.) Gabriel and the girls hit the sack as soon as we got home, and I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich dinner for the rest of us and we enjoyed lighting the rest of our fireworks.

I hate to complain about something so much, but really, you'd expect Texas to have an awesome 4th of July., You know, with all the gun powder or whatever it is they put in fireworks. I hope Arizona knows what they are doing next summer.


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We now have another reason to celebrate on July 4th as well. This little firecracker celebrates her half birthday on this fun day. We told her that the fireworks and the parties were for her but I don't think she let it go to her head.

How is she already six months old? I just gave birth to her. I remember her scary entrance into the world too clearly for it to have been six months ago.

Some of the things that Anna has accomplished in her first six months...
*She rolls over both ways.
*She can get toys to her mouth.
*She smiles a lot.
*She eats baby cereal.
*Ummm....

Okay, so she doesn't have all that much on her list right now. She's just taking her time with her "stuff". I'm sure that me holding her so much doesn't help her figure out how to do things either. I think the only things she's not doing that are probably average for this age is sitting and babbling. She does the cooing still, but not the da-da-da-da ba-ba-ba-ba babbling thing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not worried. She's little and was three weeks early and she's just going at her own pace. I have to remember not to compare her to her brothers though. Christopher was sitting and crawling by now, but he's an over acheiver anyways. The other boys were sitting by now. Leah doesn't count because she couldn't even bend at the waist because of her rock hard cast.

But Anna is as sweet as can be. That counts for something, right? She is perfectly perfect and is everything that God has made her to be. And really, she's my last baby and if she wants to stay a little baby for a while yet, that's okay with me. I'm still not sure how to Lego-proof the house anyways, so I hope she holds off on crawling for a while yet.

She goes in for her six month check up in a couple of weeks but I'm betting she's still pretty little.



Leah is giving her a kiss here, not trying to take a bite of her.

Are you done yet?

Seriously, take me inside.

Now the loving pictures with her big sister begins...

Really, I'm not having fun here!

So Leah was done at this point and wanted a wardrobe change.

 If you made it this far...

The End