i love the fourth....

The fourth of July is probably one of my favorite holidays. When I was in high school some friends & I would head down to University Ave. in Provo to camp out for the night so that we would have a great seat at the parade in the morning. Of course we never really slept so when the parade rolled around in the morning and our families showed up we were so tired that all we wanted to do was sleep during the parade. I love bbqs on the fourth, going up to Jared's family cabin and heading to the lake. I just love the time spent with family. Since we are far, far from family, we were lucky to celebrated the fourth with some American friends as well as some Aussie friends. We had a lot of fun!

Lucy loved the sparklers. She kept asking for more. She was a little crazy with them though and kept flipping them everywhere and almost caught her hair on fire & the hair of those around her.

You gotta love sparklers...

Rexbo dude

Our friends had a big park by their house and we had fun launching water balloons and the kids tried catching them. Matt snuck a few eggs in the mix which was pretty funny!

It is tradition for me to paint the kids faces on the fourth. I didn't have all of my billions of bottles of craft paint here with me, so I used some of the kids paint and used a toothpick to apply it.

It was a nice weekend. We had some scary news on Friday. I received an email telling me that there was an emergency and that I needed to call my fam asap. Yeah, I was panicking and worried sick. My family had our reunion last week so I knew they were all together. I got in touch with my brother in-law and found out that my mom had been flown from southern Utah up to UVRMC in Provo because while at the reunion she overdid it and had a few blood clots in her brain which caused her to loose her short term memory. It was hard being so far way, to say the least, but it was comforting to talk to my mom and feel like everything was going to be OK. She stayed in the hospital for a few days and eventually regained almost all of her memory. Our prayers were answered. For those of you that know my mom, know that she likes to have fun. She still arm wrestles my 5 brothers and has shoving wars in the kitchen. Apparently she was having a plank competition , where you see how log you can hold your body up off the ground with your arms,with the grand kids when it all happened. My parents were supposed to be landing in Sydney in the morning, but the Dr. told her that she should be OK to fly here in a few weeks so they will be arriving here later. We are all just grateful that she is OK.