The 4th of July! 11 days later...

I never posted about the 4th of July! Oh dear! Well, I was waiting to get my pictures off the camera and resize them. Which for me, can take weeks. So this is only 11 days after the fact. Not too bad...

Our 4th of July was a blast! It was the first 4th of July that Steve and I have been married for, where we BOTH had the day off. I also work that day, and most holidays he has off, so it was quite a treat for us to get to spend the entire day together. We all slept in late. I'm talking like 10am late. It was niiiiiice. Then we got up, cleaned a bit, and Jilly and I took off for my work to pick up my check. We cruised around Kenmore Air for a bit, then went home. Before we'd left, Steve had asked me why I put her in the pink elephant tank top and shorts, instead of something red, white and blue. I replied, because she didn't have anything very patriotic. She has a red shirt with cherries on it (pink, yellow and orange cherries) but she wore that for Canada Day, so it was dirty. Well, conveniently, on the way home from Kenmore, we pass by Old Navy! So we stopped and found a VERY cute white tank top, with silver stars and the words in red "I'm Independent." HA! I also scored some SUPER cute denim bubble shorts. I only spent $11 on a very cute outfit. Dug it.

After we got home, it was time for Jilly to scoot off for a nap, and Steve went grocery shopping. You may be wondering why on earth I would find grocery shopping worthy of a blog post. The answer is: because we hardly do it! We have developed bad habits of eating a lot of fast food or freezer/convenient food like Hot Pockets. We recently decided we were going to start eating healthier and cooking dinner every night. We even meal planned and wrote out a big giant list of all the things Steve had to buy. He ended up being gone for like 3 hours, I think? It was loooooong and there was TONS of food!! While he was gone, I heard this knock at the door. I was surprised to find Steve's co-worker Patricia and her boyfriend Sean on the porch! Well, hello! I knew Steve had invited them up, but I hadn't heard if they were coming or not. Hahaha. Apparently, they had called Steve to figure out which apartment was ours. He did call me to tell me, but he called while I was answering the door, so I got no warning. No big deal, they came in, we had a good time hanging out until Steve got home. When he did make it home, we spent another 45 minutes maybe of putting away all the food we'd just bought. Our cupboards, counters, fridge and freezer were F-U-L-L!!! It was a lovely sight. During this process, Jilly became fascinated with our shopping bags. I invested ($0.99 each) in the Safeway cloth re-usable bags, and trust me on this, they are the BEST EVER! They hold so much more stuff than those wimpy plastic bags, they are way easier to carry (much longer handles), which is important when you have a toddler who likes stairs and you live in an upstairs apartment. Plus, then you don't have all those pesky plastic bags floating around. Anyway, commercial over now. So Jilly was playing with the bags, putting them on her head and such. I decided it would be funny to do this...

She actually was quite amused. Patricia started lifting her up and Jilly was bewildered but excited by it. (That's 26 1/2 lbs of Jilly in there! Told ya these bags were awesome!)

She really did have a good time.

We kept hanging out while I made Fudge Sundae Dessert and Steve made him famous salsa (again, major thanks to Trey for the recipie). I kinda rushed the Fudge Sundae Dessert, which I learned you can't really do. So it never froze entirely, but it was still super yummy. Once we were all ready, we all headed over to some friends' from church for a BBQ and fireworks. It was like 8:30 when we finally showed up. Their kids were there, and their grandkids, plus some others from church. We had a BLAST!! There was good food, good fireworks, and good fun with everyone. Jilly had such a good time. She got into the sidewalk chalk (you'll notice it all over her hands) and got made when I took it away from her. But what was I supposed to do? Let her keep eating it? I don't think so! I may be a laidback mama at time, but I'm not that laidback. ;-) Anyway, I practically had the night off, because Patricia hung out with Jilly most of the night! It was nice.

Here are the two of them together, with the food table behind them.

Once the fireworks got going, it was really fun. Some of them were quite loud, the whistling ones and such!

At one point, Jilly started running around imitating the whistling ones. But mostly she had a great time watching. Patricia held her for lots of them, I held her for some.

We were lucky, because she didn't try to run out to them, but she wasn't scared either. She LOVED them!

There were tons of really cool ones, like the big up-in-the-sky types. It was really fun, but I didn't get any pictures of those.

I told ya, she had a great time. She would clap and cheer at the end of each one, driving the rest of us into giggles at her enthusiasm. It was a ball to watch!


After it was all over, we finally headed home, about 11pm. It was time for bed for Jilly and I thought for us too. But we ended up staying up until about 2:30am with Sean and Patricia! That did not make for a happy Aimee when I had to get up at 4:30am for work the next morning. But all in all, we had a great time!!

Stay tuned, more to come about our past week. :-)