Independently Celebrating Independence

In all of our married years--as well as for several years before for me--the Fourth of July has been celebrated by attending the neighborhood breakfast, bicycle parade, and water fight with my parents' ward. For the first time in something like ten years, we missed it. Sigh. I might be just a teeny tiny little bit of a lot of homesick.

We definitely made up for it, though, with our own Albuquerqian entertainments.

To start the day off, it seemed only appropriate to attend the ward breakfast in the park.

Heather and Brandon were there, too. Once they get married (in three weeks!) they'll be in our same ward. Too bad we'll be gone by then... But we did at least get to introduce them to several people in the ward.

We spent a few hours playing. It was fun, other than the one time that Ben got in a fight over the slide. The other boy (three months younger than Ben but a fair bit larger) scratched Ben's face enough that he bled. If you notice the bandaid in any pictures, that's where it came from.

Post-park breakfast led us back home for lunch and a trip to the pool. And yes, I know, the water is really really green. Our apartment complex doesn't get very many points on maintenance...

The fourth of July certainly isn't complete without a barbeque. We invited a few more friends over for dinner and games.

Chris has started playing bughouse during his lunch break at work--it's a version of chess that involves four players on two teams. I'm not really good enough at chess and Heather and Brandon are only sometimes kind of interested, which means that Chris hasn't been able to play outside of work. Until this week.

Turns out our friend Brian is a rather proficient bug house player, and Kyle was amenable to learning. With Brandon and occasionally Heather playing, Chris was finally able to make a complete team. They played. For a few hours, in fact.

I even overheard the comment that the best way to spend a holiday is hours and hours of bughouse. I guess it worked out for more than one of the guys. :)

And, of course, fireworks to end out the night.

We pushed through our collected set of fireworks fairly quickly because it started raining shortly after we started.

I would call that the perfect ending of a very, very good day.