Happy 4th of July

Well, the past couple of days have been BUSY! On the 3rd, we had several friends over for a BBQ (of course we really didn't BBQ anything). Three of Brett's friends from high school and their families came over. There were 8 adults and 13 kids here and boy did we have a good time. It had been a long time since we had seen them and it was great to catch up. All the dads and the kids even floated the canal that is close to our house and they all got wet and cooled off pretty good. On the fourth we met up with Brett's brothers and families at the river. Brandon brought his boat out and we all did some fun stuff in the water. I attempted water skiing for the first time ever (shown in the top photo). I almost got up on the third try but tried standing too soon and lost it. Oh well. I was a lot better at knee boarding. When it was done though, I was totally pooped out, as you can see by my lovely photo above. After fun in the river we headed to Cameron's (another brother) and we had a yummy dinner and played on their new Wii "rock band" which was pretty funny to watch. Cameron could rock the drums pretty good. We watched the fireworks from Troys (another brother :) ) and finally headed home around 11:30pm. Needless to say, we were really tired when we got home. The boys slept in until 10:30 this morning which, if you know my kids, is totally late for them. The bottom two photos I took while we did the fireworks thing. It is hard to take photos at night without a tripod so excuse the blurry nature. The one with Greg swirling the sparkler is my favorite photo though. It turned out exactly like I wanted it to.

Hope all of you had a great 4th and took a moment to recall why we celebrate it. I am truly grateful for the men and women who had the foresight (or was it the divine help?) to fight for the freedoms which we now posses. May we try not to take those freedoms for granted, that is my prayer for us all. Have fun.