The Sly Fox Seven: 4th of July

Happy belated 4th of July everyone! Well, this is going to be a long post, at least there are a lot of pictures. I was kind of camera happy I guess. We started out the 4th of July by getting up early and driving to my Dad's office in Provo to watch the parade. His office is right on the parade route. This was our 3rd annual visit and I guess has become somewhat of a tradition. It's great because we see everything with no people in front of us, we didn't have to camp out to get our spots, and we are inside where it's cooler, or in case of rain like this year. I also don't have to worry about wrestling with Emery and losing her in a crowd because she just refuses to sit still. She had a whole office to run around in.

After the parade we drove home and prepared our BBQ. I made a patriotic cake and chip dip and Chase did all the grillin'. My brother Glen and his wife Rachel came over with their two boys Jaron and Noah. Also, my sister Monica came home for the weekend from working at the girl scout camp. We had a lot of good food and a lot of fun. The cousins had a blast playing together and squirting water guns. We ended the evening watching fireworks in the culdisac. We almost drove back to Lehi to watch Thanksgiving Point's fireworks, but it was so late. When we lived in Lehi, we could see them from our backyard and even better if we walked down to the park at the end of our street, oh well, maybe next year if we're still around.

Addie drinking from the hose.

Cam aiming to squirt me.

The boys chasing Bailey.

Cute Monica enjoying some patriotic cake : )

Cam was entirely soaked after the water guns. I don't know if you can tell by this picture, but he was dripping wet. He also wasn't very happy about it and got even madder when I told him he would have to go through the garage and strip down with a towel before going inside.

Emery, armed and dangerous.

Emery trying to drink from the hose like the big kids.

Addie and Jaron drinking from the hose together.

Jaron aiming water into Addie's mouth. I guess I need to get this girl a drink once in a while, or at least a cup.

Jaron squirting Emery, she was an easy target.

The boys ambushing me as I came out of the house. They got me pretty good, I had a really wet butt.

Cousin Noah and Emery copying eachother. Emery just loves Noah and they spent the day following eachother around immitating what the other one did. It was pretty funny.

Noah and Emery.

My masterpiece edible flag creations. Chip dip on the left, cake on the right if you couldn't tell.

My master grilling chef Chase!

Polynesian dancers from the parade. This is the first time I've ever seen Polynesian dancers with huge frilly material on their bums.

This was a float from Lehi. The theme was "If I Could, I Would...". It was written on the side of the float, but I'm sure people were thinking "Huh?". The only reason I know that it was the city's theme for "Round Up Days" is because our old ward makes a float with the Primary kids every year and they had started working on it before we moved. I thought it was funny that they had dinosaurs. I'm curious as to how that finishes out the theme. If I Could, I Would.... get chased and eaten by dinosaurs? I don't know, well at least it was a pretty cool float and it was actually one of the best ones this year. Good old Lehi!

Here comes Paddington Bear, he was randomly huge!

Senator Bob Bennett ended up getting out of his car and helped push it to the side of the parade route after the hood on his car started to smoke and the car died. I was impressed that he got out and did that, but even more so that he continued on walking the parade route. I thought it strange though that they didn't seem to have any security or anyone following him. He's getting up there in age, I hope they had someone come and give him a ride for the rest of the parade.

This is probably one of my favorite things in the parade. They had a pipe band perform. This was one of the first entries in the parade, you can still see the wet road from the brief rain we had before the parade started. Unfortunately, they sandwiched the band in between fire engines and police cars. You could barely hear the bagpipes because the sirens were so loud, not much thinking on the parade schedulings part.