Happy Fourth!

This year Paul and I were really excited for the fourth of July. We've spent the past few days talking here and there about how neat our country is, despite all of the nay-sayers. It's been a couple years since I thought about the real reason we celebrate Independence Day and it was a nice change.
We slept in because Paul didn't have school (a fact I wasn't aware of until we got in bed on Thursday night). When we got up we received a text message from Penelope Mom asking if we were going to Paul's cousin Charisse's house (she lives in Charlottesville). We had no idea what that meant and made some frantic phone calls to find out that they had tried to call us all night on Thursday to see if we could come. After some discussion we decided not to drive up because President Bush was up there at Monticello so the roads would be packed and they'd be packed with at least some people that had been drinking (a daily driving hazard here).
Instead of going up to Charlottesville, we went to our Bishop's house for a pot-luck. They told us to bring whatever we wanted so I made this jello salad type thing my mom always made when I was little. It's one tub of cool whip and one of cottage cheese, powdered jello and fruit. I never liked it when I was little because of the texture but it was completely gone within ten minutes of us getting there and everyone asked for the recipe. It almost made me feel bad it wasn't more complicated. Paul also picked out a watermelon that was delicious. It was pretty fun to visit with all of the people that came. We had a great conversation with the bishop's oldest daughter who is going to BYU this fall.
There was supposed to be a Macy's fireworks spectacular on TV at nine and we planned on watching that but our cable is terrible. Absolutely terrible and the local channels are impossible to see through the snow so we missed out on that. About 9:45, we started hearing the fireworks the city was putting on. Because this is Blacksburg we didn't think they would last very long but got in our car and drove to where we could see most of them anyways. The fireworks lasted for at least half an hour after we parked the car. They were so awesome! We got to see several different kinds we'd never sen before. There was even a heart shaped one. We were somewhat disappointed that there weren't any cowboy hat shaped ones... HAHA but the tinkerbell ones and the planet ones were especially amazing. Even Regina liked watching the fireworks. SO cute!

All in all the day was wonderful. We hope all of our families had as good of time as we did.