Our usual routine of Elissa and her rocking throwing at the lake became more exciting this past weekend when she got to try out the new and much improved dock. It is actually a handicap accessible dock but we like it for our rocking throwing daughter to have gates around her. Nathan now keeps a coffee can in his pick up for rock collecting when we go to the lake.
Throwing rocks into the lake and climbing on the play ground is always fun for big boys too. A cautious slide launch…
We take all the precautions and hold our breath to let our independent daughter slide by herself. She does not care if she wore a cast on her leg for five weeks due to a slide accident. She wants to slide, by her self.
Hunter catches Elizabeth below and off they go again–and again.
Hunter inherited the “fireworks enthusiast” gene passed along from me and it is directly from my mother. She is the fireworks queen. There are always boxes and boxes of fireworks at the farm that entertain for days each summer. While we all love fireworks, my parents enforced plenty of safety rules. Usually the boys need more rules than the girls. Typically it was (and still is) my sister dancing around the yard with sparklers while the boys are trying to find ways to light off as many firecrackers as they can at once or blowing a tennis ball up into the air with the most powerful firecrackers and counting how many seconds it takes for the ball to fall down from the sky.
One of the rules I remember as a child was that I had to always to wear my cowboy (or cowgirl) boots during fireworks extravaganzas. Once though I kept my jelly shoes on and didn’t slip into my heavy and hot boots. Does any one remember jelly shoes? You could buy them in all sorts of colors. They were the stylish (very cheap) sandal for young girls…made from jelly like plastic. My feet could never take them anymore. Anyway as I was once just lighting a series of smoke bombs off to rid our yard of mosquitoes a smoke bomb tipped over on the driveway onto my jelly shoe as I was continuing to light off my long line of smoke bombs. A melted jelly shoe on my foot led to tears and a burn. My Great Grandma Esther (who I called Grandma Grandma) broke off an aloe leaf from one of her house plants and rubbed it on my burn. I never wore jelly shoes again while lighting fireworks!
Our local fireworks stores started selling this past weekend and our little town has little to no regulations it seems on when and where they can be shot off. We live away from town but can see the many displays from our deck. Firecrackers, bottle rockets, parachutes, roman candles, tanks and big reloadable shots are all necessities. Hunter sold us on it was time to start celebrating the 4th of July early and we went together to make some “needed” purchases. Elizabeth was fast asleep. Hunter and Nathan got everything organized and began the opening night show.
It was definitely worth me staying up past my bed time and getting a couple mosquito bites to see our own opening night fireworks show!
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