Good Golly Miss Molly! Oh Boy Baby Brother!: 4th of July with Our Little Firecracker

What do fireworks and Molly have in common? They are both beautiful. And loud! What a perfect holiday for our little American.

Molly is finally at the point where she gets holidays. She counts down the days until they arrive, enjoys all of the planning and preparations, and waits with (impatient) anticipation for the festivities and celebrating to begin.

Our 4th of July tradition: don matching patriotic apparel and head down to the local parade. Unfortunately our city planners decided that since the 4th fell on a Sunday that the parade should be moved until 3 pm, as to not interfere with church services. I say unfortunately because by 3 o’clock it was over 90 degrees with lots o’humidity. Fun.

Luckily we found a shady spot and readied ourselves for the marching bands playing patriotic music and beautiful floats. Oh wait, that would be a parade in a major city. We are a small Midwestern town. Our parades aren’t quite that exciting.

Here’s our little Yankee Doodle Dandy in her 4th of July outfit. Shockingly, I did not coordinate her clothes to ours (gasp). She wanted sparkles and star-spangled shorts. I didn’t think that there was any way I was talking Tony into wearing that!

Molly and Daddy looking very cute, even if Daddy doesn’t coordinate.Tony is spontaneously breaking out that smile for photographs more and more often, even without my ~~nagging~~ polite requests. Miracles do happen!

Molly and Mommy (who has always smiled for photographs).

We read this book every year around the 4th of July. Molly wanted to bring the book to the parade so that she could compare our parade with the one in the book. I assured Molly that our parade would have clowns and a beauty queen waving from the back of a convertible (or at least the back of a pick up truck), just like the book. Guess what? No clowns. No beauty queen. See what I mean about small town parades? I mean really…no clowns? C’mon!

Look at this sweet little face keeping her eyes peeled for clowns and beauty queens.

But alas, all she saw was a float…

some military vehicles…

some antique cars…

and a tractor. Wait, that’s not a tractor…

THOSE are tractors!

We did see a dog dressed in a bee costume. I tried to pass that off as a clown, a dog clown, but Molly is too old to fall for that kind of stuff any more.

The one thing that saved me is that the people in the parade threw candy to the kids. Lots of candy. Like Halloween amounts of candy. Molly told me that it was okay for her to eat all of the candy that she wanted during the parade, because it was a parade and that’s what you are supposed to do--like I am stupid enough to believe that!

But somehow, she ate as much candy as she wanted. And we all paid the price later when she had her 4th of July meltdown.

The traditional family picture. Very patriotic, no?Note the sugar-buzzed daze in Molly’s eyes.

Because of of the candy eating and all day snack consumption, I cooked a small but delicious dinner. Beef brisket, homemade potato salad and fresh fruit salad. Yum! I came up with my own dry rub recipe for the brisket. Seeing as there were no leftovers, I’d say it was a hit.

And finally, a little firework action to end the evening. Thankfully, the fireworks weren’t coming from Molly this time! Molly is carrying her baby and her cell phone. I wonder where on earth she learned that.