Fourth of July Weekend

We had planned to be hanging out with relatives and friends in Iowa for the 4th, but because our baby sister is sick, we needed to stay home. Luckily, we did have some friends and family invite us over, and we also had some ideas about how to have fun even here in Goshen!

The first surprise was a "new" bike for me, which had been hiding in the basement. Daddy got it at a garage sale and fixed it up. It has really cool flames on it.

Now that Theo has a bike, I can ride his scooter, and I love it!


We decided to go to Chandler School to ride around. About a block from home, one training wheel fell off! So we camped out there while Daddy went back to get the wrench.


It is fun to be such a mobile family. We love our bike and scooter.


On the merry-go-round.


Bike riding demo.


This video is from later, but fits the theme.

For Friday lunch we were invited to some friends' house, and they were making ice cream. Susan has been my Sunday school teacher, and she is our friend Leah's mom.

We got to hammer some ice to bits!

After the ice cream was done, we got first tastes from the dasher. It had lemon and orange and bananas in it.

After a yummy lunch, we played at Susan's house for the afternoon. The first thing we did was make slime! Then Daddy picked us up later and we went to Theo's last swimming lesson. He passed into the second level for next session.

On the evening of the 4th we lit some firecrackers, just poppers which you throw, and sparklers, and some yucky snakes. Pretty exciting--and only Daddy got burned (trying to stop Theo from stepping on hot stuff, though).


It's fun to throw a few poppers at one time.

This weekend I wore a third eye a lot of the time. Just in case you wondered what that was.

The snakes only got interesting if you lit a whole box at the same time, with a sparkler since the wind blew the matches out right away.

When our cross-the-alley neighbors got home from a weekend away, we wanted to share our poppers with them. We often yell greetings and news at them when they come and go. They are very good neighbors.

On Saturday we had planned to go see an air show in the afternoon. Who knew that the piddly Goshen Airport could get so crowded? It got pretty hot in the car, and Theo took a nap. After waiting about half an hour in two different lines of cars heading to the gate, we decided to have ice cream instead. We had a deadline of a certain time because we had been invited to a barbecue that evening.

Bo-ring...

I perked up once I got my hands (and mouth and chin and chest etc.) on some ice cream--or was it the other way around?


Anyway, who needs an air show when you have wind and paper ice cream cone wrappers? Much of the hilarity had already died down by the time Mommy took this video. On the way back to the car, we saw some jets fly around, since we were still near the air show. One of the jets was sooooo loud that I cried and cried, so we were glad we hadn't gotten into the air show after all.

The final big event of our weekend was fireworks Sunday night at the Black Squirrel golf course. We went to Jonathan and Terri's house and swam first, then as it got dark we went over their fence into the golf course, where we had a great view of the show. The bugs were really bothering Daddy, so we snuggled up with him in the blanket to watch. It was super late by the time we made it to bed.

These pictures courtesy of Daddy's new camera's "fireworks" setting.