Hope you all had a great 4th of July. It was a nice cool day out here. Just enough cloud cover to take the heat down a little. It was nice. I just love all the flags that get put up on holidays like this. I think that looks so neat. So I had to take some pictures of the kids with the flag. Of course, I forgot my camera, so I had to make do with the cell phone camera. But they seemed to turn out pretty good. 
The kids couldn't wait until full dark to do fireworks so we let them do the sparklers a little early. Man, sparklers have changed. They don't really sparkle anymore. At least this kind didn't. It was more like a flame that changed colors and a little bit of firework shooting out. They were pretty, but I think I like the old sparkler better. Maybe that's just because that's what I grew up with. But I think they are pretty.
Here are Gracie, TJ & Summer.
We also set of the parachute fireworks before it got too dark, so we could see the parachutes. The kids thought those were pretty cool, and went running after the parachutes. Summer got creative with hers.
As you could see at the beginning of this post, I also tried some shots of our fireworks. I think they turned out pretty good off this cell phone camera. I was impressed. We had quite a few favorites. I have to share about our first one....they were little fireworks. So we lit one and it was pretty for about 3 seconds and then it just went BOOM!!! And that was it. Ray & I were the firework marshals, and I had so much fun slipping one of those little buggers into the show. You'd just start thinking, "Oh, that's pretty" and BOOM!!! We got some hilarious reactions. But we also had some really neat fireworks this year. Thanks Mom & Kasi for picking those up...you got a really nice assortment.
Happy 4th to everyone!!!
