Happy 4th of July!

This morning we went to the annual Creswell 4th of July Celebration. It is a tradition that reminds me a great deal of my childhood. In Dighton we would have a parade similar to this on a late July evening. After the parade, the whole town would follow the parade to the end of Main Street and out of town to the carnival. From town you could see the lights of the Ferris Wheel and other various carnival rides that littered the field.I was lucky enough to have a best friend, Cherina, who's dad owned an old firetruck, and we would get to ride it in the parade and throw candy to everyone off of it. We felt so cool! We had the candy hook up...

After the Creswell parade there's a huge community get together at the park. The park is filled with cotton candy, music, water balloons, tables/chairs, and food stands. This is one of the nice things of a small town. It's sort of the "christmas time" of a regular family - it's the time of year the whole community meets up to say "hello" to one another. Tonight Creswell will shoot of it's wonderful fireworks. Never judge a book by it's cover because the small town of Creswell has magical fireworks. HUGE fireworks. I'm just hoping that they will die down at a reasonable time. Last year we actually had to drive around at midnight with Maysen because he wouldn't sleep and was scared of the big booms that were going on. Bailey isn't a fan either. They light off the fireworks at the high school, which is right behind our backyard. So, we're having friends over to watch the

fireworks from our front yard. Ok, so back to memory lane: In Kansas we were allowed to light off "firecrackers" as they were called (not fireworks) 3 days before and one day after the 4th. Jenn and I would save our money up, go to the local fireworks people (who were veterinarian techs the rest of the year) to buy "Black Cats" which were essentially just like M80s but on a much smaller scale. We had "punks" that we would light on the gas stove to set them off. Jenn and I would stick these little bags 'o explosions in the tree bark of our huge oak tree in the back. So, when it would explode, chips of tree bark would come flying off. We thought that was pretty awesome. We did this religiously for the entire 4 days we were allowed to. I'm so sure our old neighbor who was a night shift nurse loved the hell out of us! We even had special school boxes in which we'd keep our loot. Loren and Logan Campbell, the neighbor boys who were our age, would get creative on what they blew up, which included pop cans, Barbies, popsicle stick forts with GI Joes inside, and whatever else might look cool blowing up. We're lucky we still have our of our fingers ...

Happy FireCracker Day!