Happy Birthday America

Happy America's Birthday to all and to all a good night!

The plan today was to totally exhaust my kids so they would go to bed on time and sleep soundly.

Back-fired!

Ella and now Grace, call the 4th of July "America's Birthday" and all the fun stuff we do is a big birthday party for America. Close enough! We started the day with the parade in Provo. Much to the dismay of my girls, there wasn't much candy throwing. What good is a parade without having candy thrown at you? Heidi shared one of her suckers with Joe.

Notice the drool just ready to drop from his chin. Teething rocks!

The whole Hutch bunch made it;

that's ten adults and seven children.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to get family backlash for posting this picture.

Love y'all!

After the parade was over, the menfolk went to get the cars while the women and children gathered everything up and waited and waited. (traffic)

I soon found Joe sitting comfortably in the dirt digging with a stick.

Shocker!
When he tired of that he began throwing the dirt.

Another shocker!

We planned lunch after the parade. Emily and Sean so kindly reserved us a "multipurpose building" at Wymount for lunch. It was air conditioned and Provo was nearly 100 degrees.
A few days ago I bought a little propane grill to go on our tiny patio. I've been craving grilled corn-on-the-cob something terrible.
I had no idea how much assembly those things require. This is my husband, Adam, trying not to be totally annoyed at me for not assembling it while he was at work. Thank you for putting to all together.
And not to worry, we moved the grill outside before we lit it and grilled some seriously tasty burgers.



So to explain the total backfire comment above; we did such a great job of exhausting our kids, they fell asleep in the car driving home from Provo. So, all three took a 30 minute nap in the late afternoon.
Not good for a 7 -8 pm bedtime. So I decided to take the kids swimming to wear them out.

They swam for 1 1/2 hours and weren't showing the slightest signs of tiring. We came home anyway, ate dinner, took baths and they are still not tired. I should insist they go to bed but they are all playing so nicely I hate to interrupt them.

I hope y'all had a wonderful "America's Birthday". I'm off to put my kids to bed.