the 4th

A little late, but better than never?  I know everyone and their dog has said it, but having the 4th on a Sunday is the best. Its like an entire weekend of fun.  We started our 4th about a week early. My sister Nat and her family were in town from Australia. Laine had her heart set on a flag party for her birthday (in June), so my sis Kate and I threw her a surprise one.  We had a little BBQ at a park decorated with lots of mini flags and served an American flag cake for dessert. I don't think its exactly what she had in mind (sometimes kids are really honest), but we all still had fun anyway.

The group minus the birthday girl, me and Jordan  (Please ignore the crazy formatting... I have tried centering all of the pictures about 25 times)

Kate and Gabe. I had a much better picture of the two of them, but this picture of Gabe sums him up so well. He is so goofy!

Laine eating her birthday cake. She kept dipping her fingers into the entire cake, really only ate the cream part of her cake and most of the cream off my piece.  Apparently she really likes cream.

The actual weekend of the 4th, Nat and Ben were off in New York, so we were lucky enough to babysit the kids.  We took them to the freedom festival carnival in Provo and they LOVED it to say the least.  We found a free slide and bounce house and they had the time of their life.  My only gripe was all of the freaking big kids that kept running up and down the slide knocking the small children off the slide, out of the way, etc. Laine and Gabe couldn't really go much into the bounce house because there were 12 year olds who were jumping so hard.  They tried it, got knocked over a few times and then ran as fast as they could towards the door.

He probably went down this slide no less than 75 times. I'm pretty sure we had to trick him into leaving by tempting him with ice cream

Next, we hit up Wendy's for a late night Frosty. 

I took about 25 pictures of Gabe trying to get him to smile like a normal kid, but to no avail. I told him he couldn't have a drink of water until he smiled for a pic and the above face is what happened. I laugh every time I see that picture because he was genuinely SO sad.  Hilarious.  

Little did I know, I really shouldn't have let him keep drinking that water anyway. He isn't exactly potty trained during the night. We forgot to get some diapers from his other suitcase (that was in Payson at his grandparents), so we put him to sleep on the floor just in case there was an accident. Boy was there an accident!  I woke up at 3 am to him crying and went out into the living room only to find that he had peed all over my cream couch!  I changed him and put him back to bed and then Jordan and I spent the next 20 minutes scrubbing the pee out of our couch. Not exactly what I wanted to do at 3 am.  He also woke up at 8 and had peed again. Whoops... guess he drank A LOT of water. He just kept saying he was so 'firsty'!

We also went to the park a few times and one time in particular Gabe pooped his pants. I didn't have anything to change him into at the time, so I threw away his undies and threw him in the tub.  He wore one of Jordan's old T-shirts until we could get him some clothes.  Poor kid forgot he was potty trained.

The next day we went back to the Freedom Festival. The night before Laine kept begging to go on the trampoline thing. So we waited about 45 minutes in the hot sun in line to go.  Once she got there, she was too scared to go very high.  I'm not really sure what she was expecting since we had just watched all of the other kids jump. We had her close her eyes a few time so we could try to get our money's worth!

That night we watched some fireworks and the kids were SO hilarious.  I'm not really sure if they had ever seen fireworks "in the sky" before, so they were loving it.... oooh's and ahhh's galore.

I was trying to get a picture of them together, but right as I snapped the picture, someone lit off a firework... "Wow!!!!"

This video is really dark, but you are mostly listening for the audio part...

Snug as a bug...

On Monday we hit up the parade. Holy cow... way too many people there. We were so lucky to have found a spot. People were adjusting their seating arrangements right was we were walking by.  Also, why is the parade so long? 2 hours is just a little much for a kid (or anybody) to sit in the hot sun.  Don't get me wrong, we had fun. I just wish everyone in the parade would have walked a little faster.

Gabe also needed to wear sunglasses and sit on our laps the entire time. Just what I wanted when its 90 degrees!

We had to say goodbye to all of them later that day.  I miss them so much! I haven't seen them in over a year and probably won't see them until December (fingers crossed that we are going to Australia!)

 In the car on the way to the airport