fireworks and...other stuff

We had an eventful 4th of July this year, starting with a fun morning at the pool. We met up with our good friend Jessica - or "Jessiwa", as Alex likes to call her - and her parents, who were in town for the holiday.

Our pool club was hosting a 4th of July party, including games for the kids and a "burger fry" (which is apparently the southern way of saying a "burger grill" because there was no frying involved). Alex ate his weight in baked Cheetos, which Jessica brought to share (obviously unaware of the excessive Cheeto-consumption of which my child is capable), and proceeded to eat part of a hot dog, some chips, a strawberry, some blueberries, and then completely hijacked the hamburger that I was attempting to eat. Because that wasn't enough, Jessica's mom, Karen, helped Alex suck down a Flavor Ice pop, at which time we discovered that Alex prefers the red Flavor Ice pops to the blue ones. Because red tastes better than blue. Obviously.

Alex was too young - well, let's be honest - he is too much of a weenie to participate in the activities the pool had planned, things like diving for coins and kickboard contests and such, but he did enjoy watching the other kids have fun. Jessica and I considered entering the hoola-hooping contest, but then we decided that we were too old and too bad at hoola-hooping to enter the hoola-hooping contest. The handful of eight-year-old girls who were not too old or too bad at hoola-hooping to enter would have wiped the floor with us. While still hoola-hooping.

We had planned to put Alex down for a late nap so that he could stay up late to watch fireworks, so after a long morning at the pool, he was ready to crash.

As I mentioned, we decided to keep Alex up for fireworks this year. We decided that Jessica and her family had not met their Evans family quota for the day, so we crashed their dinner plans and joined them at a restaurant down by Fair Park, where we planned on watching the fireworks later. Alex, however, had no interest in his dinner and spent most of the time whining and begging to "play" the arcade games in the back of the restaurant. We were prepared for such a scenario, and had already planned to head to Fair Park early to check out the festivities and let Alex burn off some steam.

We found what we thought would be a good spot (but ended up moving later because that giant tower pictured below was completely blocking our view), ate shaved ice, and took turns chasing Alex around. It's kind of hard to explain to a two-year-old that he needs to sit still for an hour-and-a-half and wait patiently to see big exploding lights in the sky. Not even delicious bites of syrup-covered ice kept the kid from running amok.

We did what we could to keep him occupied, to no avail, and finally Jessica came in to offer some assistance. Seeing as how Alex ate most of her Cheetos, it seemed only fair that he share his sweat-soaked Cubbies hat with her. I'd say it's a fair trade.

Needless to say, we were all relieved when the fireworks show started at 9:30. Alex finally started to realize what all the fuss was about, and he squealed with delight when the first round of lights lit up the sky. Then again, knowing Alex, he was probably more excited about the loud noises that accompanied the lights than the lights themselves.

He was really into the show - for the first five minutes. Then it got old and he just wanted to run around and talk to people. He was completely exhausted by the time we got home and ended up going to bed around 10:30...then was up again at 1am. He whined and whined until I went in to check on him, tucked him back in, and he went back to sleep...until 2:30am. I went back in to check on him and ended up lying beside him in the bed, trying to get him to relax and go to sleep. He thrashed and whined and was clearly miserable, but he was half asleep and too incoherent to tell me what was wrong. He finally fell asleep until he sat upright at 4:30am and said, in the most pitiful tone of voice, that his "hiney hurts". Poor kid. It was then clear that he was struggling with yet another...how do I put this delicately...traffic jam in his nether regions.

Sixteen hours, two warm baths, two cans of prune juice, and a lot of crying later, he was finally back to his old self. Ugh, that was not how I envisioned spending the rest of our holiday weekend. The good news, however, is that the kid loves prune juice. The bad news is that I now know what a dirty prune juice diaper looks like. And smells like. I mean, bleeecccccchhhhh. I would have been perfectly happy to live my whole life without that knowledge.

Anyway, despite the minor "setbacks", our 4th of July was a smashing time. I can't until next year, when we can show Alex how to set off bottle rockets.

Happy belated 4th, everybody!