4th of July!

Happy Fourth of July!

Oh wait, wrong picture.

Sorry.

Happy Fourth of July!

I only have one more France post. Yay!

(was that a collective sigh of relief that I heard?)

But I'm going to skip it today, and show you some pictures from our Independence Day barbeque on Saturday (we all had other plans for today).

The Embassy had a Chili Cook-Off, but we had other things planned, so Saturday worked perfectly for us.

Our neighbors are party people, and we have partied with them for Christmas Eve, St. Patrick's Day, Cinco de Mayo, a neighbor farewell, and now the 4th of July! And it's possible that I'm forgetting something. The girl has decorations for everything!

We had a bike parade!

A la streamers (sheets of crepe paper that I cut into strips), balloons, and silver curly stuff (not ribbon, more like confetti, but really long, for throwing at parties like new years. i haven't found curling ribbon here yet. ikea might have it at Christmas time.).

And now that I'm mentioning it, I realized that this is actually the first 4th of July bike parade that my kids have ever participated in.

We had some yummy food!

I made a recipe that we got from one of Dave's coworkers when we first got married.

Whisk together 2 (3.9-oz) packages of vanilla pudding with 3 cups of milk for two minutes. Fold in 16 ounces of cool whip (we couldn't find cool whip, so we just whipped some cream with sugar, and it worked out great!) and 3 bananas, sliced. Have you had this before? Do you know what's coming next? Break up a package of Keebler Fudge Shoppe shortbread cookies with chocolate ripples (you know the ones I'm talking about) into crumbs/pieces, and stir them in just before serving. Yu-um! We had to find the pudding and the cookies at the commissary, but everything else here.

We also had some homemade ice cream. Thank you, Emily! Fresh raspberry and chocolate oreo. Yu-um again!

We had some cuteness.

And some more cuteness.

And we had some fireworks, but I think I'll write a little about that in a different post.

Let's just say I'm pretty sure the fireworks they sell here aren't legal in any state in America. At least not for general at home use.

And then to finish the night... Independence Day, of course. Outside with our neighbors' projector and screen.

Oh, and see that light over there in the trees? It's somewhere around 10:30 or 11pm.

We did the fireworks when it was still really light, so some of the kids could get to bed. Then, when we started the movie around 9:30ish, we couldn't see it very well, because it was too light outside. But it got better, and...

it was still fu-un!

Happy Fourth of July!

P.S. Do you realize that this movie was released this weekend fifteen years ago? Fifteen years! If that doesn't make you feel old, then I don't know what will, because it definitely worked for me!