Tuesday, July 8, 2008

July

July is a crazy month around here. We start off with Zman's birthday (Happy Birthday sweetie!) followed by the 4th of July craziness. My brother D's birthday is also on the 4th so we get double the fun and then we have a couple of days until Princess's birthday rolls around. Then it's the annual pack up everything, including the kitchen sink, and head down to Oregon for some quality shopping time... hum, I mean quality time with Zman's family of course. We seem to lump everything together in our family as we have similar craziness from mid-December through mid-January. I guess it's better than having something every weekend all year long... if I can survive the crunch, I get some down time in August.

The 4th is a BIG deal in Our Town and the festivities start around 4:30pm on the 3rd and run straight through all day on the 4th. Fireworks are set off at Midnight on the 3rd downtown and we always hang out at my mom's house all evening and then walk across the street to the beach to watch the show at 11:45 pm (I'm a wimp for standing out in the rain all night) This year we left Zboy home with my Uncle, figuring that trying to keep him up until the show, and then dealing with the aftermath the next day, just wouldn't be worth the trouble... Plenty of time for fireworks in the future. I didn't bring the camera this year, but they were the same as last year and I was board about 15 minutes in and ready to leave to beat the traffic. Unfortunately, the girls were REALLY into it this time around, so we stayed throughout the whole thing and only some strategic parking on Zman's part saved us from the inevitable traffic jam.

We were home by 1am and in bed by, oh, about 1:02am. The next day, or later that same day, we headed back downtown for the big parade. Our Town turns this into one big street fair with vendors selling food and games for the kids. We have OUR spot, right in front of my office, where we sit every year but we got such a late start this year that it was already taken when we got there and we had to make due with a hard curb instead of a grassy knoll. Oh well! Zboy loved all the people and ran up and down the street waving a everyone. (This was fine as long as no one waved back, as soon as they did he'd have to run and hide behind my legs.) He also stole his sister's flag and had a grand time marching up and down the street waving it as if he were the entire parade himeself.




Then came the parade! It always starts with huge firetrucks (Ruck! Ruck!) and police cars with lights (CAR! CAR!) and from then on the parade had his FULL attention. My favorite part was when the firemen threw candy to the kids and Zboy really got into chasing the candy, picking it up, and throwing it back at them! I laughed so hard I could barely breath. The poor kid will never live that down when he's older! He did, eventually, discover the yumminess of a random jolly-rancher, that he opened all by himself, and I think I spent the whole time he was sucking on it waiting anxiously for him to choke and me having to do the Heimlich Manuver on him... Luckily, all was well! Even finding out that the stuff they were throwing was, in fact, candy didn't stop my little guy from pitching it back at the poor parade participants, much to the amusement of all those around us. (You see that little scrunchy spot between between my eyes there? That's going to be a permante wrinkle in no time if my kids have any say the matter... and they work hard at it!) It's amazing to think that at this time last year we were still waiting to go to court to offically be this boy's family and now, this year, he watched the parade from my arms as a new American Citizen.


Me and the new American on his first 4th of July




1 comments:

Anonymous said...

What fun. He is such a cute new American!