Tuesday, July 6, 2010

America's Birthday - Happy 4th of July

We had a very nice holiday weekend. Katherine liked saying "Happy Birthday America" instead of Happy 4th of July, but who wouldn't, a birthday sounds more exciting!
The days and days of rain finally ended on Saturday, our area of town had 6 inches of rain in three days. So we ended up having nice weather for the holiday weekend.

Saturday - It was time to set Katherine's butterflies free. We thought she would be a little sad, but she did a great job. I think that was a great learning experiment to watch them go from caterpillars, to cocoon, then to butterflies, then to set them free! Saturday night we went to Matt's parents for his dad's birthday. We had a nice dinner, cake and ice cream, and fireworks. Katherine got to do some sparklers, and small fireworks, but her favorite was the snap dragons (the little rolled up paper you throw down on the ground and they pop). Colin enjoyed the sparklers and even tried to grab one for himself. Both kids were passed out on the ride home.

Sunday - Happy Birthday America was the key phrase in our house. We put out our flags and the USA window stickers. We went for a nice hike through the Houston Arboretum. We had fun walking through the trails, seeing all the butterflies, dragonflies, birds, turtles, and interesting bugs. Katherine was having a lot of fun until the last 10 minutes, when she looked at me all sweaty and said, "Mom, it's tooo hot to walk". She was right, it was now 11:30am and getting hot. So off home to fix lunch, play inside for awhile, and get ready for fireworks!

About an hour before we left for fireworks, Katherine was running around, with her flags, singing about America. She was READY! We drove out to the football stadium to watch the show and meet up with some friends. We went into the field we parked in last time, Matt was trying to find a place to park, we went around a truck, and SLOSH, the Tahoe was stuck in the mud! The truck Matt was trying to go around was also stuck, all those 6 inches of rain made it one muddy field! Matt and some other guys tried to push it out, and put boards under the tires, but did not work. But Matt flagged down a guy with a Hummer and he said he would help us after the show. So we grabbed all of our stuff out and went to our friends car to watch the fireworks. Our car was stuck in a water puddle with LOTS of fire ants (Matt and my legs are proof of that)!

The firework show was great. Katherine of course loved the purple ones the best, though she watched it with her hands over her ears because according to her "It's TOO LOUD". Colin loved his first fireworks display. He was quite and still and watched the whole show. He fell asleep right after it was over, it was way past his bedtime. After it was over, the guy in the Hummer did come back and tow us out. It was very funny on the way home, just not while we were there!

Monday we got up and took the kids to our neighborhood waterslide/splashpark. Katherine met some little girls to play with and Colin was running around enjoying all the sprayers. I took him down the little waterslides, at first he didn't know what to think of them, but ended up liking them. I didn't get any pictures, Matt had Katherine and I had Colin, no extra hands for the camera. That night my brother, sister-in-law, and dad came over for dinner, Matt smoked a brisket and I made cupcakes. My dad took a consulting job in Louisiana to help clean up the gulf from the oil and has been gone for 2 weeks, he is home for a few days, then back out for 2weeks. My mom is in Arizona right now visiting with her family.

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