We went to a local park to enjoy the festivities and watch the fireworks. Joey and Kiara prepared by getting all dressed up in their patriotic clothes and eating salisbury steak and mashed potatoes.
^and apparently Doritos too.
We did some face painting when we first got there.
And hand painting.
At first Joey was just excited to be let out of the stroller, but that was before the fireworks started.
Kiara and Joey at first both held tightly to the mommies and refused to look.
Joey finally would watch, but only while hugging me close, with his head on my shoulder.
After about 5 minutes of me ooohing and ahhing and pointing out the different colors, Joey finally got into it. He started naming colors and pointing and saying"yay" and "Fireworks!" and lifting his head off my shoulder. I even got him to sit on my lap facing forward to watch.
I hated missing his facial expressions. He was so cute!
Once he remembered that Deja and everyone else was watching around him, he got more brave.
At one point, he even got up to follow Michael around.Afterwards, we had a car full of excited and wide awake kids, singing and chit chatting the whole drive home (hoping we'd stop at McDonalds for ice cream cones). McDonalds was "closed" and we instead came straight home to have our store-bought cones and ice creams. Joey went straight to bed. He woke up talking about fireworks and everytime he sees pictures from last night, he says "fireworks!"
It was really so much fun...wish you were here Earl. I know you would have been as excited as I was to be with Joey the first year he stayed awake to watch the fireworks.
Despite staying awake until after 10:30 last night, Joey was still bright-eyed and bushy tailed at 6am.
