Our Kilbride World: Happy Birthday America!!

4th of July!! How did this sneak up on us?? Rory just finished school last week, at least that's how it feels. It has been a very crazy month or so in our house, hard to believe, right? Since Bryan graduated from SAMS (School of Advanced Military Studies) he has been traveling back and forth to the Pentagon working on the confirmation of GEN Austin for the post of Commander US Forces-Iraq. (You can find more information about it here and also a video of the hearing, but Bryan wasn't in the room for the hearing, so you won't see him, but it's interesting nonetheless.) So we've been missing Daddy a lot around here, so it was great to get him home Friday night, and he's home for a while without much work planned...YEAH!!!

We had a great family day celebrating the 4th at Uncle Kevin's house with Kevin, his kids, Bryan's mom and our wonderful neighbors the Kranc's, or as Rory refers to them, Ms. Molly, Mr. Ryan and our neighbors, meaning their kids Molly and Ben. The kids had such a great time, not one fuss the entire afternoon, and considering it was 8 kids ranging in age from 7 to 17 months, that is quite a big deal! The kids ran around, blew bubbles and played a little baseball.

We managed to dodge the raindrops all afternoon, and then unfortunately the skies opened up just as we were getting ready for the fireworks.

Now, you should know that where we live on Fort Leavenworth, we have prime location to watch the fireworks from the comfort of our backyard. This is beyond fabulous for many reasons; 1. no fighting with crowds or traffic, 2. the boys can be put to bed and stay there, 3. Rory loves fireworks, but really hates the noise of them, 4. we can watch them in our pajamas!! So when the skies started to pour down Rory began sobbing, "Rain and thunder please go away, I want to see the fireworks" and there is no point in trying explain what a raindate is! I kept checking the facebook page of Fort Leavenworth page that had the fireworks info, and they said they were still on, but then the thunder started...oh lord! So in an effort to stop the sobbing I took out the little popper streamer things and we had fun with those for a while, but there were clearly not fireworks.

Well, finally there was news, and indeed they were going to have the fireworks, I'm pretty sure it was because because the weather for the next night was going to be worse. So off we went into the backyard, umbrellas and raincoats, and our neighbors braved the rain to come and stand in the rain for show.