Both girls got up unusually late so we had a late breakfast. Natalia's been hounding me for reindeer pancakes for a couple weeks now. She is thinking of the ones I made when our elf Jingle came to stay last Christmas. I told her maybe on Saturday, but then Thursday when she brought it up to Charlie he told her sure. I didn't want to let her down after that, so I got to work. He had already eaten breakfast, but I wasn't about to make a batch of pancakes for just Natalia so we all had to enjoy them. Bummer right? ;)
Anyway, we just had a low key day. Once Lydia was down for her nap I tried to get Natalia to rest as well but she refused. I really wanted her to nap as well because I wanted to keep her up late to go see the big fireworks that night. Eventually I gave up and sent her on her merry way to play with Daddy outside in her pool.
We had plans that night to go to my brother's for dinner and fireworks. After last years debacle with the noisy fireworks I wasn't going to buy any this year. I still had some left though and we took those along with us just in case. We did manage to stop at a stand on our way to his house to buy lots more Pop-it's because those were the big hit last year. So after a yummy dinner with my dad, my mom came with her husband and we set to work lighting everything. The kids loved running through the smoke of the smoke bombs. Natalia seemed to like the sparklers this time around. Lydia had a blast throwing the pop it's on the ground and stomping on the ones that didn't pop. Both of them did much better then anticipated with the noise from the fireworks as well. Lydia only got upset at the very end (i think more out of being tired then anything else). After we were done we took the girls home and it was straight to bed for Lydia.
We showed her some videos on YouTube to prep her for the noise as well. So after we parked and made the trek down the big hill on Americana we found a great spot in the park. We were really surprised to see how not busy it was down there. I remember times when I was younger and we'd go to the fireworks, we would have to be there 2 hours before hand to just get a decent spot. Not so now, we were there about 9:30 and we got up pretty close and there was still tons of space. Natalia did awesome with the wait and just munched on the snacks I'd prepared for her. Finally around 10:25 the show started. She covered her ears at first but after a few minutes she was fine. About 10 minutes into it she asked me when the big show was going to start (that's what I'd been calling it) ha ha ha, I told her this was it. So she was obviously unimpressed by it. But then again so was I. They had timed it to music but there were a lot of weird pauses when there wasn't a single firework going off for a good 30-45 seconds. And it happened a few times. The actual finale wasn't huge either. It was maybe just a few set off at the same time. So weird. Maybe it seemed grander to me as a kid, or maybe they actually did do a better job back then who knows. Either way it was still fun and I'm glad we got to do it together. We made the hike back up to our car and almost as soon as we started driving away she was out cold. We didn't get home until past 11:30pm. Poor thing was up way past her bed time. I transferred her to her bed and got some jammie pants on her and she went right back to sleep.
I'm excited to try again for next year. As she gets older she'll be less and less scared of noise and more into the fun of it all. All in all it was a good day.
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