The 4th has come and gone, and by last check we had no hospitalizations or citations for public drunkenness, so things must have gone alright.  Saturday morning Karl, Andrew and I headed up to Boom City. Amy keeps trying to push our budget higher, but we stood firm(ish).  Of course our budget was entirely spent on legal decorations, like confetti pops.  We’re responsible upstanding citizens, don’t you know.

I spent the rest of the day getting our house ready for the party (i.e., saturating everything I could with lots of extra water and hoping for no errant sparks), while Katie prepped some of the food. Later that night, Malin’s mother Helen and Peter arrived for a 10 day visit.  If we haven’t mentioned it, Malin told us 2 weeks ago that she’d decided to head home in January instead of extending for another 6 months with us.  We’re sort of hoping that Helen will pressure Malin into changing her mind, so of course we were happy for them to visit.

Catrin had come over to visit as well, and the Swedes headed off for some shopping, and came back in vary patriotic garb.  This was only fair, since we had dressed the boys as Swedish football players (Sorry, Laura – we’ll get their Sharks gear back on them soon, but Swedish colors are the same as Michigan’s, so it’s kind of hard to resist).

People started trickling in around 3:30, and we started up the barbecue in the back yard, with Carter on grill duty (have I mentioned how much we miss you, Laura? Carter’s good and all, but he doesn’t stick around afterward to clean the grill for us…)  We set up the play yard across our yard, to keep the boys back from where Andrew was displaying his sadistic pyro streak by mercilessly wiping whole regiments of tanks from the face of the Earth.  The boys had a fantastic time stepping on the little snap pops, and revelling in all the attention.

Eventually they were sent up to bed.  The Swedes left us to head downtown for the fireworks show, and Carter, Marilyn and Ryan headed home.  We few dedicated patriots remained – Katie and I, Karl and Tristine with Julien, Amy and Andrew, and Julie and Trevor.  Around 9:30 we finally headed outside.  The next hour before was very cool, with some beautiful explosions erupting all around us.  I had a chance to play with my camera for a little bit, which resulted in some fairly cool photos.

One of neighbors had decided to remain in town instead of taking his boat out on the lake to watch the show, and he’d made a timely run to the reservation for some explosives.  Man, our neighbor knows how to blow stuff up.  Eventually including our garage, as during the clean up afterward a cake was knocked over, firing fireballs in random directions.  The first three bracketed our house (one to the left, one to the right, and one above).  I ran toward the garage and scooped up Julien just as the last fireball exploded about 3 feet from us.  It didn’t hit anyone directly, but burning hot embers hit Julien’s toe (with no lasting damage), and Tristine’s lip (with a 2nd degree burn – terrible enough, but thank god it was her lip and not her eye).  Julie and Trevor had already left, and Katie was inside at the time, but I think it took a few hours for the adrenal to wear off for the four of us outside.  When Karl and Tristine got home, Julien wouldn’t get out of the car until their garage door was closed, because he could still hear the fireworks…But that was the end of the night.

We’re all a little ambivalent about what we’ll do next year.  Almost certainly we won’t be sticking around our cul de sac, which suddenly seems way too confined and dangerous.  Maybe it’s time to go watch one of the big displays.  At least we know that the snappers are fun though, right?