4th of July

Unfortunatly I don't have any 4th of July pictures to share with everyone...I sort of forgot about picture taking yesterday, but we had a wonderful 4th nonetheless!

I woke up pretty early and woke Craig up dead out of sleep and asked him, "off the top of your head, give me your favoritie 4th of July memory." He was a little confused, still half asleep, but responded with, "eating fried chicken at my Grandma's house after playing outside all day."

If you know anything about me, you know I'm HUGE into traditions! I want our family to have traditions for EVERYTHING! I have even been known to start traditions for days like George Washington's Birthday, and President's Day. Christmas is obviously a HUGE day full of traditions, and we both grew up with very different traditions, so this has been an on-going discussion between us. The discussion has lasted a good 10 years now, and I *think* we have finally agreed on a Christmas tradition for our family (We'll share this in ...say...the December time frame though). Anyway, the Fourth of July has always been one of those holidays where we have never established any special traditions (sigh). Every year has been completely different, between traveling, selling houses, job obligations, etc. This year however, I wanted to start getting some 4th of July traditions up and going. Craig always teases me and says that our future kids our going to run every time they hear the word tradition. :).

Through a little brainstorming, and after Craig completely woke out of sleep, we came up with the following 4th of July traditions:

1) Put our flag up in our yard (we were unsuccessful this year since our we lost our mounting hardware...)

2) Go get some take-out fried chicken before noon and then put it in the fridge so it is cold for dinner (who wants warm fried chicken in the hot month of July?). We like it cold! This tradition, is incorporated based on Craig's favorite 4th of July memory.

3) I home-make some potato salad. What goes better with cold fried chicken, than nice fresh potato salad. I have always associated potato salad with summertime. I had never made this before yesterday, and I sort of made it up as I went, but it turned out pretty yummy!

4) Fruit pie/pizza. We bought this yummy treat yesterday, but in the future, I might try making this one myself.

5) Get some *safe and sane* fireworks to light off at home. I say "safe and sane" because that is the law in our city. Fireworks are legal on private property as long as they are "safe and sane." I like that, seriously makes me laugh. It reminds me of the old speed limit in Montana "safe and prudent." I tried to explain to Craig that taking apart black jack fireworks and "re-engineering" them was not "safe" and certainly not "sane." My voice fell on to deaf ears (sigh).

6) Eat our cold chicken, potato salad, and fruit pie while watching a baseball game.

7) Light our own fireworks and watch the big one's too.

That is our 4th of July traditions in a nutshell! Overall, pretty simple. We'll see if this actually sticks in future years, but nonetheless, it made for a great 2011 Fourth of July.

I hope everyone had an equally wonderful holiday as well. Do you have any special 4th of July traditions?!?!? (I'm known to steal traditions too!)