4th of July

The 4th of July can be described by the 5 F's....Food, Fun, Family, Friends and Fireworks! This is my mom's favorite holiday. We have had a tradition of family get togethers on this holiday for as far back as I can remember. Back in the good ol' days we celebrated with aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins. It started off with breakfast at my parents then a full day filled with volleyball and swimming, lunch, more swimming, games and then a BBQ dinner and fireworks. As time has gone on our celebrations have dwindled to just our immediate family. We still do a big breakfast at my parents and hang out to play games and after dinner we do fireworks.

My parents had surprise bags for the grandkids. Cameron got a cute sippy cup that had his name on it. I'm sure he will be using it sooner than I think!

Cameron (5 weeks old) in his cute 4th of July outfit...red, white, and blue.




Genive and Herb waiting for the festivities to start. Not sure what weirdo Janessa is doing in the background...she must really be excited about the 4th of July :)

My mom ordered special 4th of July shirts for her and my dad (I told you this was her favorite holiday...she takes it pretty serious). They were really cute and said Grandma's Stars and Grandpa's Stars and they had 6 stars with each of their grandkids names written on each star.

We had so much fun playing croquet. Grampy made us all laugh by changing the rules as we went along (ie, if your ball "kissed" another ball you got to go again). When we asked him to see the instructions, he suddenly didn't know where they went :) Well, it worked pretty good for grampy because he won.

Jeremy and I ditched the family for a few hours and went to a seafood fest BBQ at my friend's house. They went all out and had a full on seafood dinner with crab, different kinds of shrimp, yummy garlic potatoes, corn on the cob, dips and dessert. I had fun learning how to crack crab and eat it for the first time...it was ok, but I have to say it's a heck of a lot of work for not very much meat! Jeremy has a love hate relationship with shell fish. He loves to eat it, but his body hates him after he does. He is alergic to seafood, espeically shrimp. But that didn't stop him from eating until he was full. He paid the price later that night though. His eyes were itching and burning, his stomache hurt, he took several trips to the bathroom, and his nose was stuffy and itchy all night. Even after all that he thought it was worth it.

Proof that not only did I taste crab, I worked hard for it...it isn't easy to crack those things open. I even ate shrimp without dry heaving. Basically I put myself through an intervention and Desensitization really works. I've worked with many clients on their phobias, likes and dislikes and now I can say I have taken giant steps towards my dislikes.

Linda is a veteran at this....I am a rookie, but learned pretty quickly how to eat crab. I also learned that with enough butter or coctail sauce you don't really taste the crab or shrimp :)

I had to feed Jeremy while he fed Cameron. It was quite interesting. After dinner we met up with my family at Michele's house to watch fireworks. Spencer had fun telling us the names of all the fireworks and lighting them. I watched most of them from inside the house because they were too loud for Cameron's little ears.