Happy Birthday, America!

Okay, I know this is incredibly late...but bear with me. It's for posterity's sake, right?

The weekend of the fourth, The Mr.'s sister came to visit. We decided to head downtown and find the Mice on Main. We printed off the clues, grabbed their little dogs, and headed out. We also had an ulterior motive - visit the Saturday Market downtown. Yuuuum!

We made a few pit stops along the way. The boys would often hang out with "the girls" (aka The Mr.'s sisters pups). There's a little doggie bistro that we stopped in which was pretty cute. It was weird being able to take the dogs inside with us.

They are pretty cute dogs. And don't "yip, yip, yip!" Which is key because if they constantly yip'ed they may not have survived the weekend. Not gonna lie - I'm not a fan of what I fondly call "yip yip" dogs.

We also had to make a stop by Mast General Store. The Mr. loves this place and he likes to sneak in whenever we go downtown. I don't mind so I waited outside with his sister while the boys went in to shop around.

Next stop - the park. I've always found the park to be so pretty and I jump at any chance to be able to go down there. If I were to do a Trash the Dress session - this is where it would be, hands down.

So since I like the park so much, we wanted to take them there and show them the bridge. When you stand still on the bridge you can feel it moving as people continue to walk by. It's a crazy feeling but the view from the bridge is well worth it.



After our adventure downtown, we headed home to relax and get ready for the cookout. Our friends T&J came down for the cookout and brought homemade "cheese pie" (aka mac and cheese baked in the oven) and homemade apple pie. Oh, it was so good!

The boys also decided that they wanted to light off some fireworks so they headed out in the afternoon to pick some up. Buying fireworks the day of is the second best idea to buying them the day after (they are so cheap then!). But if you buy them the day after then you obviously can't set them off on July 4th. So we went with the second best option.

I decided to try out my not-so-elite camera skills to get some pictures of the fireworks. The ones that came out the best were the ones I took on the "sports" setting. I thought I'd share some of these with you.




The last few pictures have a story behind them. The fireworks stand the boys bought their fireworks at threw in "one free firework of their choice". So our friend, M, chose "The Tank". The whole evening he talked about how it was going to be the best one out of all of them. So we had to save it for last. And we did save it for last. "The Tank" had little wheels on it - so we thought it would roll down the street after we lit it off.

...instead it just fell over on the side. And was a pretty big disappointment. It was funny though. :)

And I'll leave you with a cute picture of me and The Mr.