I LOVE 4th of July. It is probably tied with Christmas as my favorite holiday EVER! BUT the July temperatures definitely have Christmas temps beat at least!

One of my current favorite things about Independence day is that we host it at our house. We are lucky enough that the 4th of July parade goes down the street right in front of our house so we literally sit in our front yard for the parade (where the kiddos get entirely too much candy..). Tyler drives a fire truck in the parade since he is on our volunteer department and I don’t know who enjoys that more- he or the kids. Jude (my youngest) actually told me that he was going to be driving the fire trucks- which is a terrifying thought!

After the parade, we just relax, grill and eat wayyyy too much. We get to sit and wait for the fireworks in our backyard, where we have the perfect view. We usually light off some small ground fireworks or have the kids do sparkles while we wait. This year, we were crazy enough to let them ALL hold their own sparkles- no worries- we were VERY close by and even had to jump in once when Jude got a little excited with waving his around. We had an awesome 4th of July!