Happy July 4th!

July 4th is always a special holiday in my family because it is our annual shrimp and crab feast at my Grandma and Ernie's house.  It has been a tradition with the whole family (my mom's side) since I can remember.  This year was the last one (Ernie said there had been 25 years of shrimp and crab feasts...wow)! Being a proud American has always been important to my Grandma and she is probably more patriotic than most Americans.  I can always count on her to proudly have her American flag up on every holiday as well as many smaller flags adorning the yard around her house.  This year Aunt Vic's mom, Mimi, had a great idea for us to have a our own 4th of July parade in the neighborhood.  As you know Hannah and Owen have parades in the house almost daily so they were really excited about this idea!  We went down to Aunt Vic's house on Wednesday morning to decorate our wagon with streamers and such while Mimi decorated Wesley's walk around car.

 We started the morning off by decorating our hats for the parade.

 Then we practiced making "music" with our flutes from Mimi.  

This took a few tries before they really got the concept down.

Then we headed out to meet up with Mimi, Aunt Vic, Champ, and Wesley for our parade.  Mimi had made noise shakers and pretend fire crackers plus she had downloaded parade music on her phone.  Way to go Mimi!

 We pick up shakers and flags from Mimi.

Wesley is decked out in his patriotic car and ready for the parade too.

After our parade we headed back to Aunt Vic's house for special snacks:

 Hannah chose to make her frosting for her graham cracker blue

 Owen chose blue too.

 We painted the graham crackers with our frosting.

 Mmmm! Yummy!

Wesley chose to make his frosting red.  We also had red, white, and blue goldfish, but we liked the frosting and graham crackers the best!

 Next we helped make red and blue Jello for a special project Wesley was going to complete later.

After resting a bit from our busy morning we loaded up in the car and headed down to Grandma Hanna and EE's house for our shrimp and crab feast!

 After eating lots and lots of crabs and shrimp we head outside to play some water games thanks to Nana!  Hannah and Owen enjoy playing with their cousins from Danville-Chase, Carly, and Cayden.

 The little ones had fun trying to figure out how to use the water guns to squirt each other and the adults. 

 Owen chases Daddy through the yard!

 Cayden gets ready to play.  We had to fill a bag (punctured with holes) with water and get it to the other bucket and dump it out.  The team who filled their bucket first or ran out of water first won.

 Mommy's cousin, Tiffany, helps Owen dump out his bag of water.

 Cayden decides that maybe it's more fun just to get his Grandpa (Mommy's Uncle Roland) wet!

 Daddy and Hannah are up to no good.

Chase fills up his water gun with water from Owen's bucket.

 Owen helps Aunt Renee refuel too.

 This is so much fun!

 Next we get ready to launch and catch water balloons with a towel.  Owen helps Mommy and Daddy load up their launcher.

 Hannah and Owen loved playing with the water balloons.  We had to fill up more and more.  Daddy and Mommy help Hannah and Owen toss water balloons to each other.