Bacon, Battle, Bang!

OK, if you have read my blog for any time at all you know the drill when it comes to Independence Day.  It is always the same, and one of our family's favorite holidays.  We always have a crazy big breakfast, followed by a big water fight, and of course, the day ends with fireworks.  It works for us, and so it will always be that way.

Breakfast is a lot of work, and my family is not really great at doing anything early, but half the fun is making breakfast together, even if it isn't all ready until almost noon.  We all nibble and that seems to work out fine.

While we wait, Lisa and her daughter Andi play with a WWII era flag puzzle that I scored at a garage sale recently.  It is really cool, and it has all the pieces!

Did I mention BACON?  The brown sugar bacon always plays a major role at every 4th of July breakfast we ever have.  Seriously!  Don't you just want to lick the screen?

Look at that golden salty sweet and gooey goodness!  Those sugary strings are the BEST!  Yeah, baby!

This is what we are talking about!!!

(Note how the platter of bacon is disappearing even before I am finished taking the pictures.)

We wait all year for this!

Feast...  Digest...

then....

WAR!

If for me the 4th is all about the bacon, to the kids it is all about the water war!  As always, it is kids versus adults.

As the years pass the kids get bigger, and scarier!

But we just get more experienced so we manage just fine.  That's right, Grandma. Kink that hose!

Another tradition:  Alex dumping bucket, after bucket, after bucket of water on Grandma's head.  Every year!  My devilish child get great pleasure out of soaking his grandmother, and the attack is relentless during the whole battle!

Poor Grandma!  Just how wet can one woman get?

Finally, the adults declare victory (we always do, and so we always win.  The kids never declare victory.  They would fight all day if they could, and so we always declare victory, and thus always win! Then they call us poor sports and complain that we are wimps because we don't want to battle for hours on end.  We don't care, being the winners, of course.)

Yep, I really get into this holiday.

This year we tried something new - Pop Rocks cookies that we found on Pinterest.  Fun, but the pop rocks baked inside didn't work.  Next time we'll just sprinkle them on the top of regular frosted cookies.

This year the City of La Quinta did their own fireworks for the first time, so we were excited to go.  But it was crazy.  There were tons of people at the park where they advertised the fireworks would be, but before the show, nobody quite knew where the fireworks would actually be, and so people were set up facing all different directions.  When they actually started they were behind a bunch of trees and buildings and too far away even though we were right where they told us to be.  Oh well.

It was still a great, great Independence day!