First the Fourth

Before jumping back into house "stuff," I'll give you a quick wrap up of our 4th of July celebrations. We awoke, and Buck soon declared our independence from a move to the woods. Gosh, mixed feelings! Yes, I am SO much more physically and emotionally comfortable here, but I like financially comfortable too :) Okay, we're fine financially, just not soaring ahead and preparing for tomorrow. But, God provides our daily bread, and we'll just keep taking what He offers. It will be enough . . . maybe just barely enough sometimes, but enough :)

This announcement changed our plans for the day--without a trip to the house to consider our future, we could work on meeting the needs of our present. First stop, the annual J4 brunch at our former Bible study leaders' house. They host this little party for the whole church (well, not quite the WHOLE church) every year. It's a nice chance to fellowship and enjoy yummy breakfast goodies that I didn't have to make :)

Afterwards, we stopped by the pet store to reload on cat and guinea pig food, plus hay, minus cat, almost plus hamster (dad said no), plus happy hedgehog because cat was minus but cat food was not. Whew! I'm good at math, lol :) Next, Buck heard about a discount store selling everything 50 percent off of even the lowest discount prices, so we stopped in to reload his work shirt collection. We also managed to get the girls each a pair of shorts that weren't blue jean! Granted one is (navy) blue and the other is (white, stretchy) jean, but it's an improvement nonetheless--and for $5, it's almost a steal.

Of course projects, including final prep for carpet, took up most of the rest of our day. The boys would disappear periodically to join the festivities at the neighbors' house. We'd reel them back in, work on stuff, then they'd head back over. It ended up being quite a party in on the block! Only three of the eight houses didn't empty onto the street for fireworks fun. Oh, we did hop back in for our dinner at home--Buck made tri-tip on the Traeger . . . soooooooo delicious!!!

Back to the fire-crackies :) I finally shut Chauncey in the laundry room with his blanket. He didn't seem to cry nearly so much. I think he was so stressed with us being out with the booms, and him inside with the reverberations that the laundry room gig was calming somehow. He likes small spaces when he gets nervous, which is hard to accomplish when you're a 100 plus pound puppy :)

There were some good sparklies, on our block! The boys did endless bottle rockets (with careful dad supervision during lighting). They enjoyed these mega-sparklers we bought at the fireworks tent. We collectively decided the "Game Changer" was the most impressive bang for our ($5) buck. We set one off and then our neighbor saved his for our neighborhood grand finale. The kids had a great time, and we all laughed a lot--especially at the fireworks that would zoom off with impressive speed and sound . . . only to go *poof* at the top of their trail. We were rolling, it was so funny :)