4th of July Fun

We had a nice Independence Day weekend, choosing to stay local to enjoy the festivities with friends and neighbors.  Now that we actually have friends in our community, these community events have become a lot more fun and social!  We were so happy that Mom and Dad even came to help celebrate, coming to our house after Uncle David's annual party and then staying the night for a visit the next day, too.

Patriotic Kids

Patriotic family

Watching the parade

Kids sat on the curb, super cute-like

Our neighbors, Steve, Caroline and Max (+ soon to be baby girl)

We kept Luke and Jack occupied between parade pauses with a bag of corn chips each

Claire felt most happy when spontaneously trying to dart out into the middle of the street, usually right into a marching band.

I'm a big fan of the bagpipes

At the fireworks and concert later that night.  

Breakfast at the beach the next morning

Playdate on Saturday that was already scheduled.  Mom and Dad just came with!

Little boat trip before they headed home.

I went to the Sarah McLachlan concert at Ravinia that night with my friend/neighbor Cara.  It was awesome!

Randomly decided to go to Six Flags on Sunday

We took Claire this time, and we had SUCH a fun time as a 4-some.

Her favorite part was the frozen lemonade slushy.  Sharing is not her favorite thing in the world.

She LOVED the pirate water gun ride, both getting wet herself and helping Daddy shoot the water out of his guns.

Perfect dress for a Tuesday afternoon.  Isolene made this for her.

Accessorizing with a yellow noodle

It's a tough life

Here are some other kid updates:

- Luke has a bunch of play traffic cones.  He likes to set them up all over the house.  The other day he set up a bunch of them in his room and instructed me "this is the entrance and this is the exit".  I liked his vocab!
- Playing with his train table one night - "Do you like my cute little train track?  Bet you never saw one like this before."
- When I asked him what he wanted for his birthday, without hesitation: "I want an alarm clock that goes BEEP BEEP BEEP….and I want a stool for Claire Bear."
- He likes to use his shovel to dig up all the gravel and dirt around our back garage, or put it in his snow sled and tow it around with his Zoom Buggy.  The other day, he decided to make a hill out of it, and then ride his "dirt bike"over it for an hour.
- Almost every day he tells me, "C'mon Mom, let's go check our garden!"  He loves to see all the growing that is happening, and harvesting is the best part.
- Claire continues to be a total whiner/ difficult child for the past few weeks.  She is so stubborn, and so determined to have her way all the time.  She gets so jealous when I give attention to Luke.   If I'm reading him a book, she'll throw a fit and try to physically push him off my lap and will grab the book and try to throw it.  What a little stinker….If he finally gives up and gets up, she backs her butt into sitting down on my lap and I swear she smirks.
- We've introduced a pillow and blanket into her crib!  What a big girl!
- You've heard how Claire has been waking up SUPER early and being so cranky that we have to drive her around town, well that happened again on the 4th of July.  I was talking to Cara about this and she gave a suggestion that totally worked!  She said that they experienced the same thing with Jack and that it turned out that he was just cold!  So we started putting another layer on Claire for bedtime and now she's back to sleeping to at least 5:45-6am, sometimes even later.  Yippee!!!  Sleep!