Fourth of July - the day Tony and I met 9 years ago - has always felt more like our “anniversary” than our actual wedding anniversary. It’s always been special. Until last year.

Last year was just awful. July 5th was supposed to be the day we made a decision on whether or not to just fold our adoption plans or to keep chugging away. With that hanging over our heads and the depression and lonely I felt at that time living in isolation in our new neighborhood and loneliness facing our first fourth of July away from my two good friends who had moved out of state, I could have easily just slept the day away. All I remember from that day, last year, was sadness. Profound sadness.

I really REALLY needed this year to be different. After all, things are different! We are here in Texas, where we are so much happier. We have our baby girl. Life is GOOD!

And then the rain came. For 40 days and 40 nights, it rained. No really, I’m sure you’ve read about all the rain and flooding in Texas. We’ve been lucky that we’ve dodged any sort of flooding entirely and haven’t had nearly the rain that Austin and Dallas have had. But still, it has been rainY every day, almost exclusively, for weeks and weeks. Depressingly rainy. I have lost motivation to cook, to clean, to do fun things. I think there is one worse thing that Snow and Ice and that is RAIN! I am sure now that I could not live in Seattle. This is horrible.

Of course the Fourth was no exception, with it’s 80% chance of heavy thunderstorms all day long. I didn’t even make plans for the day becuase what is there to do INSIDE?!

But!!!!!

We were redeemed! The weather was just rainY and only sprinkled on and off, mostly off. Our neighborhood pools were all open free for the entire day and since we have never been to any of them, we decided to do that, weather be damned. If the pools were open, we would swim. The kids had a blast! Noah almost mastered swimming, Dalton and Teegan had fun on the diving board and Addy froze to death. She is so spoiled with our 90 degree pool water! But she had fun too.

Then we grabbed dinner and headed out to the fireworks. We had intended to go to the main park with all the festivities but it was so busy that I decided to take the water taxi to the park. By the time we made it up in line, the water taxi announced that all riders would have to stay on-board for the fireworks and we had a little pow-wow with the kids and decided that watching the fireworks from the boat on the lake would be an AWESOME way to watch. And that they were! The show was fantastic, Addy was in awe (and she got to try her first sucker which definitely made her VERY happy!), the kids were happy. It was a wonderful way to end the day.

And compared to last year? It was perfection!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 10:30 am and is filed under Holidays & Vacations, Photos & Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.