The Fourth of July!!!

 

I hope that everyone had a wonderful Fourth of July, we sure did (for the most part). The kids, especially Malachi, have been so excited to go to the parade and watch the fireworks, so they didn't mind waking up earlier than usual so that we could get a good spot to watch the parade. We were sitting at the beginning of the parade and so the kids got a ton of candy. I think that I am pretty competitive by nature, so I was encouraging them to get as much candy as they could and when it was all over I wondered why I encouraged them to get so much candy, because I don't really want them to eat it and I'm not a fan of hard candy (now if it were chocolate it would be a different story).

 

In the bottom right corner is a picture of Malachi holding some of the candy he collected at the parade. I tried my hardest to get him to look at me, but this is as close as he got. He couldn't take his eyes off of the parade in fear that he might miss the opportunity to get more candy.

Down below are some pictures as we were waiting for the fireworks to start, we played some croquet. You can't go wrong with a game of croquet...

 

I wish that I could say that our day had a good ending... A few minutes into the fireworks a fight broke out, a little ways in front of us. It started as a verbal, yelling, fight (I don't think that I have ever heard so much swearing in my life) and then it turned into a physical fight with a little shoving and then next thing we know these two guys are rolling around on the ground beating on each other. At one point there was even talk of killing. I don't think that anyone wanted to try to stop the fight out of fear that they might become the target, and so Roger called the cops. Four cops showed up and they were there for less than five minutes and what did they do to the guys that were fighting? NOTHING! They didn't even get their i.d. from them. As the cops were leaving, Roger went up to them asking why they weren't doing anything, and the cops said that the guys that were fighting were family and that they said that it was just a verbal argument (which any of the hundred witnesses around would have said differently) and then Roger asked why they weren't even given a "disturbing the peace" ticket and the cops said that he could do that, but it wouldn't do any good. So these guys got away with ruining every one's fireworks show, not to mention all the kids around that were crying, because they were so scared. Not anything against cops in general, but I have yet to be impressed with any around here.