4th of July

Today was a fun Independence Day!

After church and dinner, we had a fun visit with my cousin Donovan and his family. They were in town visiting his wife Jen's brother and stopped in to say hello.

After they left, we decided to try out some fireworks that we had gotten the day before.

My dad had this little rake and scooper that he was using to clean up the debris from the fireworks.

Here's most of the gang hanging out watching the fireworks. Actually, it's the whole gang up until this morning.

I thought this one was funny. I was trying to get a picture of Adam and our new "gang" arrival Katherine. My dad snuck his head in there.

Katherine flew in just after 8:00 am today and we leave for Alaska bright and early in the morning.

Even though Alex is Chinese, he'd never set off nor seen fireworks so he had a good time. Here he is with a Roman candle.

Susannah, Adam, and Alex went to a big fireworks show, but the rest of us stayed in our neighborhood for some serious fireworks - a little friendly competition between neighbors. It was pretty awesome. While we watched, my mom and Katherine braided my hair into a LOT of little braids for the trip. I just counted them and there are 24!

After the others got back from the show, we tried some camera tricks with sparklers that Susannah and Adam did last year. I am just adding this disclaimer that these photos were taken with Susannah's camera and it was Susannah's idea, so I kind of stole these from her, but I loved them so much I just had to post them. She has these (obviously) and more of them along with some cool firework shots that I hope she'll post soon. Anyway, these are great because on the night mode on the camera, the shutter stays open long enough to get lots of motion with the sparklers. In case you can't tell, we have USA written with a star between the U and the S and swirls between the S and the A and at the end.

This is Susannah's favorite shot ever because of all the light it captured with my dad and myself shooting off Roman candles. It's also cool because you can see my dad in 3 different places.

Here we have USA '10. Susannah made the comment that my mom had a "skinny A." That made us all laugh.