I've Got That Boom Boom Pow!

Yeah, at some points this weekend, the booms and pows got a little too close for comfort as well! Lots of things combined lead us to cancel our Yellowstone trip, which I was terribly sad about. However, my parents very kindly offered to let us have our "Camping Trip" in their back yard. So Friday afternoon, we packed up the car to the brim (literally. We had sleeping bags and suitcases piled under kids feet, in their laps... wherever we found a spot we shoved our gear) and headed down to my parents house where we pitched our tent for the entire weekend. Friday night we had our first firework show in the driveway. Now, let me say I was surprised at the self restraint by my family... growing up with four brothers and a father that were ALL pyros when it came firework time, made life QUITE interesting. That said, we had a fun, safe little show (little meaning it only lasted a couple of hours), and retired to our tent for the evening around eleven o'clock or midnight.

Saturday, Cory & I took the girls to the dollar movies and we all watched How to Train Your Dragon. Then we got the girls all dressed up in their bathing suits and went to a little city waterpark there in Herriman (can't beat free!) which was actually really nice and not too crowded either. Saturday evening, we got my parents fire pit going and roasted marshmallows and ate smores. I even got my gourmet smore, made out of Almond Joy instead of a regular chocolate bar. And yes, it was VERY yummy!

We were a little more wary the second night, and raided my parents closets for a sleeping bag and a couple more blankets, which kept us nice and toasty warm. I even fell asleep to tiny raindrops hitting the tent (thank heavens for the tent rain tarp, or whatever it's called, because we never did get wet).

Sunday we got up and were able to shower and get dressed to join my parents at their church, which was fun seeing all our old friends from when we lived in the ward as well. After church we went home and stuffed ourselves full of yummy food yet again. I was grateful for the abundant selection of fresh fruit, which I stocked up on, since I managed to lose a filling the previous day while snacking on one of Zoe's Dots she got at the movies. After we got the girls off the waterslide that was giving them all hypothermia, we sat and cuddled for the better part of a few hours, while poor Madison slowly turned back from blue to purple to pink again, and then we prepared for our 4th of July Fireworks show.

Our Sunday night show wasn't much different from the Friday night show. We had maybe a handful of bigger fireworks we had saved for the night, but still all Utah legal fireworks we watched in the driveway/street in front of the house. I got a little braver this night because I REALLY wanted some good firework shots. But that's tough when you're not watching an actual professional show where huge fireworks are being shots hundreds of feet into the air with a nice black background. Little fountain fireworks means you have to get a little closer... so of course I found myself inching closer and closer as we went from sparklers to little fireworks, to the fun stuff. At some point, my brother Aaron decided he'd make things more interesting by lighting some of the popping ones, waiting a couple seconds, then throwing them up in the air to make them look like real fireworks. Then my niece Briana found herself on the wrong side of a fountain firework that was shaped like a rocket and therefore had to be mounted on the grass of the curb, while she was obliviously setting off roman candles into the air. When we all started yelling at her to scoot back, she got scared, dropped her roman candle and ran into the garage. Meanwhile, the roman candle still had about 4 or 5 rounds to shoot off and lay pointed right at everyone located in the street. I remember grabbing my tripod with camera attached and running for the neighbors yard, and only let one expletive slip when the second to last shot missed me by an inch or two.

That's about as exciting as the evening got, thank goodness. But nobody got hurt, and we still had fun. The girls were so worn out from their weekend of fun, they started dropping like flies after about the first 45 minutes or so, so we started laying them in the bed of my parents truck while the big kids got to finish the firework show. All in all, it was definitely not my Yellowstone trip I had been looking forward to, but we did have a lot of fun with family. You can see the gallery of our Firework shows HERE. I still have a few shots of our activities from the weekend, but those edits are going to have to come later.