Celebrating The 4TH NH Style

This summer has really gotten away from me! My time has been spent tending to sick family members (human and pets), working and fitting in some play time. There hasn't been much time for other responsible things. And, now it's the last day of August and we are prepping for the first day of school! Yikes! So, this week I hope to throw up a few posts to share pictures of a few things we did over this lovely summer.

With all the weekends of sick kids and other commitments, we didn't get up to our New Hampshire get away but 2 times the whole summer! Once was the 4th of July weekend and the other was the "staycation" we took a couple of weeks ago (which I hope to blog about soon). This is how we spent our 4th.

With the 4th falling on Saturday, my company was closed Friday. So we headed up to NH Thursday night and met up with Mike's cousin Gretchen and her awesome son Derek for a little hike. Mike's back was a little tight so he opted out. So it was just the Mom's and the little boys:

Love These Guys!

Gretchen and Derek

Derek was super sweet to the boys, especially Cade. And, as always, Cade loves hanging with the big boys so he just adored Derek and wanted to do everything he did. That meant we had to rein in the adventurous Derek a bit so Cade wouldn't get himself injured. Derek was a really good sport about it.

Snack Break

Cannon Mountain Ski Trails

Dylan and Derek Conquered the Big Rock

The weather was gorgeous and the boys were mostly great. Dylan had a very uncharacteristic meltdown on the hike which took a while to recover from. But, eventually he did bounce back into a good mood which was great because the day was young. 

After our hike, we went to Gretchen's parents' house (Mike's aunt and uncle) who somewhat recently moved only about 45 minutes from our place in NH. This was our first time to their place and we had a lovely lunch with them. Somehow, I got no pictures of that! Luckily, the bear that Uncle Alan spotted down the road from their house that morning did NOT join us for lunch.

On the 4th, we headed down to the carnival that nearby Waterville Valley was hosting. The kids had a great time crawling through the inflatable dragon and going on the inflatable obstacle course.

Cute Brothers

I LOVE fireworks and was really hoping this would be the years we could keep the kids up late enough to watch them. However, after our neighbor set some off at their house the night before and Cade had a MAJOR freak out about it, I realized my hope of going as a family this year wasn't going to happen. As any good New Hampshire (sort of) resident has to do, we did some fireworks of our own. Well, kind of. We stuck to the relative safely of sparklers.

Cade wasn't much of a fan of them either.

But my Dylan LOVED them!

Double Sparklers!

After the boys went to bed, Mike and I sat on the deck and were able to spy some of the higher fireworks going off in Waterville Valley. But the show the fireflies were giving us in our back yard was even more spectacular. It was really great to get to our beloved New Hampshire home again.