4th of July weekend...

Again…traveling back in time to this past…July. More specifically, to the beginning of July.

2-5 July 2015

As many of you know, 4th of July is an important holiday in the United States. It's also known as Independence Day.

Let's start the celebration with a pottery class. It's maybe not the way most Americans celebration Independence Day but it works for me!

Aunt Beth, Aunt Margaret, Lily, Annika and Ava are taking the class with me:

Turns out both Margaret and Beth are talents pottery-ists.

Here's one of my pieces:

Smiley Avie Baby:

Oh, and did you notice her totally appropriate t-shirt she's wearing???

***Mark flew just before the weekend. Yippee! It's always better when we're together as a family.***

**** Aaaaaaaand….Jason, Christina, and Claire are also here! I think Jason bought out a fireworks shop. He brought with him lots of fireworks!

These particular fireworks are spewing out tiny paper parachutes that the kids are racing around trying to collect:

Up & Away! an explosion of parachutes:
Grant with his parachutes:

There goes another!

From oldest:

To youngest….

All kids were amused with the parachute bombs!

Insert laughs and giggles:

Uncle Mark really IS a lot of fun!

And now …

How about watching monkeys jump on the trampoline (which is infinitely better than monkeys jumping on the bed ….as we all know what happens to those little monkeys!):

Waiting and watching smaller fireworks while sitting/standing in front of the garage:

*****

It's cherry picking season!

We all went to our favorite, kind-of-sort-of local farm to pick those delicious red globes of pure joy.

Only, we discovered that the cherry season would be short…so short that it lasted less than a week. Thank you late spring frost for ruining a fantastic harvest season. We managed to scrounge up enough cherries to fill some buckets but the sweetest, juiciest ones were nearly impossible to find and retrieve (from the tippy tops of the trees…which required a balancing act on a ladder).

Ava is thoughtfully demonstrating the use of the fruit-picking ladder:

Those are some pretty looking berries:

I quietly listened in on Jason and Ava's conversation. I don't remember the details but I do remember it making me smile.

Buckets loaded with sweet cherries…ready to be weighed and paid for:

Weird thing about the cherries this year? There were absolutely NO sour cherries (aka pie cherries)!!! Ray drove to a different farm while we were still picking and bought sour cherries. Cherry pie is a must! (okay, it's not …and to be honest, I'm not very fond of cherry pie but Mark loves it ..)

And now it's time for the Big Fireworks Show (we just got a taste of them earlier):

The fireworks were loud but with Mommy's help Bonnie got to enjoy them too!

BOOM!!

It doesn't matter how many times I've seen these floating lanterns…I love them. I'm so happy Jason bought several of them and lit them…and with the beautiful evening skies here we could see them fly further and further away from us.

Thank you Jason for the awesome fireworks display!!!!

No 4th of July celebration would be complete without a trip to Rosy Mound Beach (well, for us anyway. I don't know about you.).

See that narrow strip of beach? That's what Rosy Mound beach has been reduced to over the past two years. It's bizarre. I remember it being a bigger, swooping sort of beach but now it's this *itty bitty* piece of sandy beach. We managed to stake out a claim though!