Independence- Saturday

We started our 4th of July celebrations on Saturday the 2nd, with an early morning balloon fest. We had everyone out the door and at the field by 6:30 am! This is a HUGE accomplishment, I am so not a morning person (especially super prego) and neither are 3 out of 4 of the kids! But, we all did it so that daddy could see the Darth Vader Balloon (wink, wink). This was Vader's first year here, and our first year getting up on time. I'm glad we went this day too, because I heard the balloons were cancelled on the 4th because of icky weather.

Vader brought out a bunch of geeks in costume. I guess if you have it, you only get a few chances a year to wear it, so why not, right?! I'm just glad Jon doesn't feel the need to wear the costume he has!!

After we baked in the sun as it crested the mountains, we went for Krispy Cremes. We thought we'd take the kids inside this time since they had never been in to see the doughnuts being made. They thought it was pretty cool. 

Then we went home and did chores really fast and then headed back out to take Evey to volunteer at the freedom fest street fair with Grammy. These next photos are taken with my phone and so are pretty crappy. :)

Paris LOVES snakes!! She was one of the first kids up there to pet that big boy!

Evey and Lex aren't as enthusiastic, but still think snakes cool, and Winter, didn't care too much for it. But Evey got her to touch it once.

The girls got their hair done by Paul Mitchell students. We knew this was going to be there, so I was let off  hair duty for the morning, as you can see in all the previous pictures!!! This is one of the things that contributed to getting to the balloons on time! Hair for 3 girlies takes a while sometimes!

And Lex got a sticker. He really wanted me to take a picture of it!

Winter has a firecracker on her face, that you can't really see. She made (okay Grammy made it) her visor at the booth Evey and Grammy worked at.

We spent the rest of the day shopping and running errands. Then went to Grammys house to watch and listen to the Stadium of Fire.  We have yet to buy tickets to the show, but when mom lives about a block and a half away from the stadium and we can see the big screen from her front yard, it makes it hard to want to fork out that much money! Maybe we're just cheap! :)

We barely missed the fly over, the kids were heading out the door, so Evey and Paris saw it, but Lex FREAKED out from the sound and came running back in the house yelling for us to close the door . Poor guy. He has a hard time with thunder too, but he's been working on that and getting much better, but the jets were a new kind of loud!!

So we sat out and listened to the show, and David Archuleta and some country guy....I know blasphemy on me for not knowing who he was....Country music generally not listened to in our house. Okay, it was Brad Paisley. Anyway....

I took lots of firework pictures, but decided to only post a few, because once you see a few you've seen the all, am I right? However there were some pretty awesome ones this year that I don't think we'd ever seen before! And they were timed to the music, which we could tell but not hear due to the sound delay. It was still fun and awesome!!

See all the fire on the bottom....that's the stadium! It is literally On Fire!! It would be awesome to see from the inside! This is apparently the biggest stadium firework show in the US!

Then we waited at least an hour for the traffic to die down before we ventured home.