happy (belated) 4th of july

Again, I've been too busy for blogging. Busy having fun, that is. Pouring rain all yesterday morning made us worry we wouldn't be able to do anything fun, but it eased up and dried out and we did have a nice holiday.

Here's the big news: James caught his first fish! He and Greg both caught a few, apparently (Evan and I stayed home for napping purposes), but they were too small to keep. The other major event of the day was a small barbecque we had -- we had just a few friends over, but lots and lots of food. I tried making homemade ice cream sandwiches, which were not half bad. And of course, there were fireworks. We watch the fireworks from a hill in a park overlooking the city, where we have a nice view of the city fireworks, as well as a couple of displays further north, without the noise and crowds that come with being closer to the fireworks. Both kids were up until close to eleven last night -- neither would sleep before the fireworks -- so we're having kind of a low-key day today.

Since this was the first 4th of July where James was old enough to understand some of the history behind the holiday, I had a lot of fun recalling stories and facts about the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence and so on. I did have some help from a cute book we found at the library: John, Paul, George and Ben, which talks about several of the founding fathers (Hancock, Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, as well as Paul Revere, who is not a founding father, but an interesting historical figure). The book has a nice mix of history and silliness, and James was pretty interested in hearing about the war. Sadly, my knowledge of the Revolutionary War (or any war, for that matter) is not very extensive, but I think he does have a good idea now of the basic idea of the thing.

I hope all of the Americans reading had a nice holiday as well (and for the couple of non-American readers here, well, I hope you had a nice Tuesday).