The McMahon Family

Happy Fourth of July!  For some reason, the Fourth is my favorite holiday.  I think the reason I love it just as much as Christmas is that it has the excitement and thrills of a holiday, but it’s contained in one day.  Kimberly and I were talking about how it’s surprising that I haven’t planned out a whole agenda of week-long events for the fourth each year with parades and area fireworks.  Then I realized as I was preparing this blog, the reason I don’t is that I love the charm of a one day holiday.  All the other holidays I love and celebrate with such enthusiasm last awhile and that causes them to lose some charm.  Even Thanksgiving gets stretched out to more than one day with family or traveling involved.  Please don’t hear me complain.  I LOVE family gatherings and holidays.  I just also love simplicity sometimes.  And the Fourth of July offers that for me.  Here’s how we spent this glorious holiday this year.

We started out by celebrating Uncle Denny’s birthday with fishing, pedal boating
and eating.

And finished by attending the gorgeous fireworks display in Champaign.

I do not know why everyone else can get great snapshots of the fireworks. I took a ton and all of them turned out horribly.

As usual, I took way too many pics.  There was so much laughing going on with each picture, I can’t possibly blog them all.  There were several photo shoots happening all day between group shots and family shots.  I will spare you the pictures of me rolling backwards down the hill attempting family photos… 🙂  But please, if you’re family and in the mood for pics, check them out!! The rest of you will probably want to log off right about now.

I usually wait until the boys are finished with breakfast before I get in the shower in the morning.  That way I can make sure they get cleaned up correctly and get the dishes cleared to minimize the risk of a mess while I’m not eyeballing them.  However, the other day we had plans and I had to get going before they were done.  So with a stern warning not to make a mess, I rushed to my shower praying all the while for not too big of a mess to clean up when I got out.  Here’s what I found.

Two bowls on the counter

And a clean table.

I had you thinking it was a mess, didn’t I?  I was ecstatic to see they had cleared the table, even taking their bowls to the counter, and no mess!  SHOCK and one happy mama.

Part 3: Pre-Fourth Celebration!

For our annual Pre-Fourth Celebration, we headed to Paul and Kristen’s to see what goodies Uncle Paul found this year.  And boy were we surprised!

You can see all of our fun in the June album!  Paul did a great job finding the perfect combination of air show and ground show. 🙂  The air show would have lasted a little longer had the nice policewoman not asked us to keep it down…

This was one long day.  In the morning, we started by taking the boys to the WBGL Backyard Bounce event.  It was our first time attending and had heard from several people not to go as the lines were really long and it wasn’t worth the wait.  Still, I wanted the boys to go.  Mac and Patrick are just now starting to enjoy jump houses and trampolines.  Till now, they’ve shied away from them and flat out refused to enter most of them.  They are generally more likely to try them if their cousins are there.  So I made Nicki and Matthew brave the sun and heat and go.  And we loved it!  The lines were not long and the boys loved the fact that they could go as often as they wanted.  It was amusing to see Mac’s face as I answered his question, “How many tickets is this one?”  He was slightly confused when I told him, “None.” 🙂  It took Patrick a few minutes of watching to finally agree to go.  Once he tried the first one, he was up for all of them!

Long Day Part 2: swimming.  No pics this time, but it was refreshing after the hot morning at the park.  Patrick did get a quick snooze in after swimming before heading to Part 3.

I LOVE my minivan.  I needed to take the boys’ bikes to Meme’s house.  No problem!
Stow the seat and load ’em up!