4th of July

We had such a fabulous 4th of July. There were so many pictures so instead of trying to post them all I'll just share the slide show.



The kids and I started a little early. On Thursday we went to "Ellis Island in the Park" at the Scera Park. It was a great way to teach the kids about how immigrants came to our country. They had 200 flags set up in a star shape that looked awesome. And we all passed the immigration tests we took!

Friday morning started early with the Balloon Festival. We were remembering how cold we were last year. Certainly didn't have that problem this year. The kids loved the Smokey the Bear Balloon, the Pig Balloon, and the Strawberry Balloon. My favorite is the Maple Leaf Balloon that reminds me of New England.

We joined half of Provo at McDonalds for breakfast. I've never seen it so busy. Next year we need to remember to bring our own breakfast. We then headed over to the Parade Route. We had put down a blanket before the Balloon Festival and got a pretty good spot at the beginning of the Parade. The highlight this year was the float our Stake had in the parade. The Stake had asked the primary kids to draw what they thought the float should look like. We never heard anything about it after that. When the float came down John started yelling that it was his float and they did exactly what he had drawn. We'll just let him believe it.

We then came home for a much needed rest. It was a forced naptime for everyone. And Jessica was the only one that didn't actually fall asleep. We then headed over to Uncle John's and Aunt Diana's for the family get together. Our children didn't understand why we would not let them go swimming with everyone else. We only had an hour and a half to eat before heading out, and since they had already had 10 hours of swimming in for the week I didn't feel too bad for them.

And then we headed to the Stadium of Fire. The kids were so excited. Apparently we got the wrong information about bringing things into the stadium and had to throw out the water bottles we had brought, oops. Our seats were in the North side and the stage was on the South side, but thanks to the big screens we could see what was going on. There were so many highlights of the event. Some of our favorites were

• Sky divers
• Planes flying over
• the flag color representation coming down the stadium and over our heads
• 1300 dancers dancing about the summer Olympics in 7 minutes
• Glenn Beck master of ceremonies
• Military representation and the families seeing their loved ones
• Blue Man Group
• And of course, Miley Cyrus -- I was the one that needed earplugs for all the screaming girls!
• And you can't beat 30 minutes of amazing fireworks directly over your head

We all fell into bed when we finally got home! This was a 4th of July we won't forgot.