Happy 6th of July!

Just a couple days late....sadly, we had a less than stellar 4th, but we'll try again next year. Rand decided to celebrate his independence by waking up at 5:30am and not going back to sleep! Werner had an early morning hair appointment, so I spent the morning dozing on the couch while Rand watched PBS Kids all morning. He had a fantastic time.

After I finally woke up enough to function, I thought I should prepare Rand for the fireworks, since he'd never seen them before. I found some videos on YouTube and he was absolutely fascinated. He immediately started asking when we were going to go see the fireworks -- but the show didn't start until 9pm, so it was a very long afternoon of replying "Not yet, but soon!" to his queries.

I managed to hang off on leaving for the Fireworks Place (actually a park in Peoria) until 6pm, when it had cooled down to a lovely 102 degrees. They had a lot of fun things for kids to do, and Rand had a great time playing with bubbles and doing little carnival type games, like throwing rings and beanbags.

When we went over to the water slide area, he waited and waited patiently in line for his turn on the little kids slide -- and when we were next, the ride closed down due to the winds that had been steadily picking up! Rand handled the disappointment really well and we headed off to get some funnel cake. Meanwhile, the sky kept getting darker...and windier....with "light-en-ing"!

While we were in line for our funnel cake, the wind started blowing so hard that the water slides fell down, the food booths started loosing their flags, and the sand started really stinging when it hit us. I picked up poor Rand and he buried his face in my neck and wouldn't look up -- so I decided to call it a day. It was nearly 8pm by then and the fireworks were going to be cancelled due to the nasty weather, so we headed back to the car, stopped at McDonalds for an ice cream cone, and watched the fireworks on TV.

We were both pretty disappointed, but Rand cheered up with the ice cream and had a good time watching them on TV. Thankfully he seems to have forgotten about the fireworks since he hasn't mentioned them -- and both Werner and I know better than to bring them up. Maybe we'll come out to California for fireworks next year, since I'm pretty sure they won't be cancelled there because of a monsoon!