Wed. 4: Happy Fourth
of July!! When we woke up this morning, Janika
was already in the kitchen cooking red, white, and blue pancakes. She is usually the last one up but she
manages to get up earlier for a holiday. I brought the five oldest to the
festivities at the park in town. Rick doesn't particularly like going to those kinds of things and so he offered to stay home with Josh. While at home he put together some DVD slide
shows and home videos of the kids.
The
kids did the free games and won several gift certificates to various
restaurants and so we took advantage of all of their "free personal pan
pizza" coupons to go to lunch afterwards.
The kids also did the big slip-and-slide and the blow up slides. We all went swimming in the afternoon and
then ate a big dinner of barbecued chicken, potato salad (which Janika made all
by herself while I took a nap), jello (also made by Janika), green salad, corn
on the cob and home-made ice-cream (made by Rick). We had gotten a nice ice-cream maker as a
wedding gift and never opened it until now! I hope it wasn't from any of your reading this or you might get offended that we took
thirteen years to open your gift! Now
that we know how to use it however, I am sure it will get a lot more use!
When it got dark the kids did
sparklers and we got some glimpses of fireworks from our backyard. Rick
and Janika and Jase were going to sleep outside on the air mattresses in the
pool. I didn't like that idea for fear
they would roll over into the water and be completely incoherent. Jared
was so worried (probably because he overheard my concerns) that he was crying
and begging them not to do it. They only
made it an hour though. They played
cards on the air mattresses in the pool and then came in and went to bed in
their own beds. We all slept much better there!
Josh
is finally starting to walk a lot more.
He has been taking steps for awhile but then usually reverts to his
jungle-boy crawl on his feet (that is so super fast everyone laughs when they
see it). He is now walking more and more
though. He also learned how to crawl
down the stairs the right way and so I don't worry as much. He always "talks," but we haven't
quite figured out what language he is speaking yet!
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