Go America!

After the grand adventure that was the hot air balloon festival last Independence Day, we decided to go again. With a bit more advance notice, I got up in the dark of predawn and went with the rest of my family. Unfortunately, the balloons were unable to fly due to high winds. They did inflate them though and Malia and I were lucky enough to be standing right near the mouth of one as it was inflated. It was hot! And loud! But it was also really neat to see!

Due to our morning excursion, we ate out patriotic pancakes for lunch. It didn’t get quite enough food coloring in them this year and so we had pink strawberry pancakes, greenish blueberry pancakes and white coconut pancakes. They were still delicious though!

As usual, Matthew was the rock star of the patriotic mocktail.

We even made a special red white and blue dessert. The patriotic cheesecake parfaits were a hit (so delicious!) and since I dug around on Pinterest, I even had a Matthew friendly version. In fact, he lucked out because he has about eight parfaits that he can work his way through for the remainder of the week!

Our personal fireworks display was really tame this year, but we did have a dozen boxes of sparklers to light. I love that my kids, even the teens, will come out and play with the sparklers!