And the Rocket's Red Glare...

We had a nice, relaxing 4th of July this year. We spent the morning buying yard stuff at Lowes and then did some light work in the yard. For some reason, yard work seems very American to us. We often end up doing yard on the 4th.

We had decided not to have any friends or family over. Being new to our neighborhood, we really wanted to focus on getting to know our neighbors. We really enjoyed spending time with them and had a great time..

Of course, I bought Gwen a little outfit for the occasion and tried to get her to pose for a photo...

Of course, we ate way more food than we needed too. We grilled everything we could think of: steaks with onions and mushrooms, corn on the cob, and even artichokes. My brother taught me how to grill artichokes on our last trip to Vancouver, and now I'm obsessed with them...

I had decided not to make dessert because we are trying to be more healthy, but at the last minute, we went to the store and bought some ingredients to make this beauty...

Gwen really liked the smoke bombs and sparklers...

Once the loud fireworks started, Gwen was a little bit nervous. I had to hold her and cover her ears. I asked her if she wanted to go inside, but she wanted to watch them.

Pretty soon, Gwen got used to the fireworks, and was laughing, screaming, and clapping with delight when they would go off...

We were a little bit nervous because one of our neighbors had a bunch of people over and they started drinking pretty early. We wondered if they were going to do something stupid once it was time to start lighting off fireworks. As it turns out, they didn't buy too much. Mostly they just sat at watched what the rest of us were doing.

I was lighting a fountain and after I lit it, I accidentally knocked it over. I tried to put it back up, but I knew that I was out of time, so I backed up and hoped for the best. The flames shot out right towards the group of drunk people and they all quickly scattered, trying to avoid all the sparks. I felt really bad, although I'm sure they didn't remember it the next day.

Later, Rick lit a firework that shot out big flaming balls. After it had done about 3 shots, it fell over and again, flames were flying at the drunk neighbors. Then, it spun around and fired shots at another group of neighbors, hitting a little girl and her dad (who happens to be a lawyer).

The little girl was freaking out and wouldn't come back inside. Rick felt terrible because we had now almost killed our neighbors twice. We packed up the rest of our fireworks and decided to just watch the rest of the show.

At around 11 pm, Gwen couldn't stop yawning. We packed it in and called it and night. We had a great day!