The 4th of July has never been my holiday, even before our country started attacking my rights so bad that I’m embarrassed to be a citizen, but it means that I don’t have a lot of experience celebrating it. Sure when I was in Boston I went to the fireworks a few time, mostly because it was easy - all you had to do was be outside at a certain time. But I’ve never done the parades and parties and whatever else you do on the 4th.
The first mistake I made was not realizing I should have picked out red, white and blue clothing for everyone. Because apparently that’s thing number one you do when celebrating this holiday. We definitely own a lot of things that could have passed, and I specifically know that G has patriotic PJs. Which would have helped since G pretty much only wears PJs when he can, and also means I should have thought about what PJs he got into the night of the 3rd. But I didn’t, which means he ended up wearing Halloween PJs all day on the 4th haha. It totally doesn’t matter and actually made me laugh all day.
We decided to go to the parade and thought we had a plan, but apparently you need to get there a lot earlier than we thought! We ended up stuck in traffic which turned into a road closure, turning around to park and then walking to the parade. We missed a few minutes of the beginning, but honestly it turned out fine. The parade was longer than I expected and I was definitely ready for it to end about 10 minutes before it did (although part of that might have been because all the trucks decided to have a competition to see who was louder and 2 of our kids weren’t fans. Next time ear muffs?)
We didn’t have to walk too far, and we ended up watching the parade pretty close to where it starts which gave us an added bonus I hadn’t thought about - extra candy! Almost every float and truck in the parade was throwing candy, and at the beginning they still had a lot to throw and weren’t tired of it yet. We had a handful tossed to us by almost everyone who went by. I also enjoyed the few who were dousing the crowd with water, since it was HOT out that day.
I honestly didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did, but something about being there with my family and watching the kids have so much fun made me a bit emotional. It was the perfect family outing, everyone was happy, and hopefully we made some good memories. Even F loved it. She sat in the stroller for most of the parade eating a lollipop, pointing and waving at every baby she saw.
We ended the day with hamburgers, hotdogs and popsicles with friends, and it did feel like a celebration of a day. Unfortunately we also ended with a lot of tears and tantrums, but that was mostly because it had been a long few days and everyone was overtired and ready for routine again. All of us have been struggling to catch up on sleep, but we’ll get there. Tom and I collapsed at the end of the night once everyone was in bed and then went to sleep early ourselves. I had just gotten comfortable and started to fall asleep when I woke up to fireworks.
Although our friends went and brought their kids, we hadn’t even attempted to go to them. Besides the fact that we were all tired to begin with, they were over 3 hours past the kid’s bedtimes. It wouldn’t have been good, so we didn’t even try. I did get up briefly and look at them, and realized the ones I’d heard were someone shooting off fireworks from their property, not far from where we were. Pretty, but not enough to keep me from going to sleep.
About 10 minutes later, though, the real fireworks started to go off across the lake. Again I got up and watched them for a minute before going back to bed. At this point G had woken up, too. I almost got him back to sleep when I thought better of it and asked if he wanted to see them. And so the two of us ended up watching them out the window. I was honestly surprised how loud they still were when we were across a lake and indoors, but it actually worked out perfectly for him since he hates loud noises so much. It was his first fireworks and it was probably one of my favorite most recent experiences. Just the two of us sitting in a quiet house where everyone else sleeping, cuddled together talking about them in whispered voices.
