Weekend Festivities

The Parade

The City of O'Fallon had their 4th of July Parade on Saturday morning which was kind of nice because it made it so that we could go. It was a beautiful morning if you can't tell from the pictures. I had planned on taking just Alyssa at first, but Danny got guilted into going (he hates parades). Alyssa loved the parade.

Ashley loved the flags they handed out and the CANDY. After the first candy was thrown and collected, she spent the rest of the time in her seat, at the candy bag, or somewhere in between. I don't even want to think about how much sugar she consumed that morning.

As you can see from the picture below, the girls were in the shade, thanks to Danny holding up our big umbrella the entire time. My seat however, did not fit into the shade so I got some nice tan lines from the morning.

The Carnival

The City also put on a carnival for the weekend. After Ashley's nap on Saturday, we went to check it out. They had a free kids area with inflatables, face painting, games, crafts, etc. We spent some time there, but were eventually drawn away by the pleas to go ride the Ferris wheel.

We let them each ride 4 rides. Here is the Ferris wheel...

the tea cups...

and the Merry-Go-Round. This, by the way, was a pretty terrifying experience for Danny and I. We were too cheap to pay an extra three bucks for one of us to go on with Ashley. I have never seen her let go while riding a Merry-Go-Round, so I figured she would be okay. As the ride started, I noticed that it was a little rougher than any other Merry-Go-Round that she has ever been on before. We watched as she came around each time and seemed to be gradually slipping off to the side. We kept yelling at her to hold on tight which was useless since she seemed to think that it was the perfect time to dig a booger out of her nose and started to ride one handed. I kept having visions of her falling off of her little bunny and I felt like the worst Mom ever. That ride couldn't end soon enough and we were glad that she made it through safely. As a result we cursed the rip off carnival rides that don't let parents ride for free just to assure the safety of their children. I mean, at least a seat belt around her would have been nice. All right, I'm done venting. At least she enjoyed the ride, even if we didn't.

The Fireworks

Or should I say, lack of fireworks. On Sunday, after church, we went over to the house of our closest friends in the area for a BBQ. We didn't put the money into a bunch of fireworks this year. We got some champagne poppers and used up the rest of the sparklers we had left over from last year with the hope of enjoying a great fireworks show that night. Here are the girls with their sparklers.

We headed off to the fireworks show about 45 minutes before it was scheduled to start. We thought it would be plenty of time, but it wasn't. Everywhere we went was super crowded and we finally ended up just stopping on the road in what appeared to be a good spot. After almost getting rear ended two different times, we got scared up onto the curb. And after all of that, the fireworks only lasted 10 minutes. We were very disappointed. We were even more mad when we got the girls loaded back into their seats and spent a good 10 minutes waiting up on the curb for the line of cars to have enough of a break to allow us to drive off of the curb. That's what we get for going to see fireworks on Sunday instead of Saturday.