The Martins: July 4th

We don't have many photos from the 4th of July, but here's what we have. My Mom came over the evening of the 3rd to watch the Butte firework display. We got to the park in Butte early to relax and listen to the live music, however....we got caught in a terrible storm of thunder, lightening, and LOTS of rain. It was quite comical to see us all try to hide from the rain under blankets and Mom tried to hide under a jungle gym in the play area. Needless to say, we were all soaked. We did try to stick it out for a while longer as we air dried, but once we saw another storm on the way we headed home and missed the firework display. Oh well...we did get our fresh kettle corn and we could actually see the firework display from our front porch in Ramsay.

On the 4th we went to the parade in Butte. By the time we left town it was 91 degrees and we were sun burnt, tired, and thirsty. The parade was okay, but not as good as last year. No candy was thrown for the kids and being a political year the parade was much more politically focused than we would have liked. In fact, it was so political that Obama decided to come to Butte with his family for the parade. It really made me angry that our family holiday event was being watched over by the secret service and up until the day before the parade the plan was to restrict parking for a good portion of the parade route and to make people go through metal detectors. Luckily Obama decided he didn't want everyone watching the parade to have to show their hands to the secret service as he marched in the parade, so he just watched the parade from a restricted area. Go figure, seems like everything happens in Butte, Montana.

All in all we had a great time. The kids had fun doing fireworks at home on the evening of the 4th and we had A LOT to go through. It's actually strange to do fireworks after having lived in Alaska for so long without them.