Fabulous Fun for the Fourth

A local town has a big 4th of July parade that we go to every year. This year the parade was held on the 3rd, I guess because the 4th was a Sunday. We started the tradition of going early to "Mithmille", where the parade is, to have breakfast first. That way we get a good parking space and we beat the crowds. This year we ended up earlier than usual, so after breakfast we walked around for a while before getting our chairs and picking our seats for the parade.

Here's Rudy carrying my wallet as he walks through Smithville.

Waiting, rather impatiently, for the parade to start.

Rudy' favorite part of the parade is always related to music. He also liked the soldiers who called out counts and beats while walking (hup two, etc.).
Here he is using my iced tea bottle and a lollipop to play the drums.


At the very end of the parade, a group was throwing out these beach balls.

Can you tell that someone was mad when he didn't get one? We were near the end of the parade route and the whole way they were heading toward us, hey were just constantly throwing out balls. As they got to us, they seemed to slow down, or take a break, so he missed getting one. He talked about it for a long tie after.

For the fourth, we spent much of the day on the beach. Some of Paul's friends from high school were in town and we hung out with them. Although it was supposed to be a very hot day, the weather at the beach was wonderful. There was an ocean breeze and almost no humidity. It was the perfect beach day. Rudy had fun playing with the kids and we spent almost 5 hours there - we usually don't make it past 3 hours!

Rudy and L were playing with water gun. Paul and his friend, V, got bigger water guns. Here are the kids running away from Paul.

Rudy in action...
I snapped thee pictures as quickly as my camera would let me.

The end of the day - Rudy was picking up sand, throwing it in the water and then running away from the waves. He had a blast.