Daily Photos: Day 184 Canada Day

Tuesday, July 1st

In an unusual display of blatant nationalism we dressed up and gave the kids each a flag to wave. The flags were quickly taken away after this picture and before anyone lost an eye.

In the afternoon we went to Halifax where there were festivities at a park. We tried to interest Ben in the face painting or bubbles, but all he wanted to do was play on the playground equipment. The weather finally felt like summer so we took turns sitting in the shade with Izzie and standing in the sun watching Ben. There were hordes of children at the park, so this was actually trickier than usual. I must be getting old (and cranky?), because I scolded somebody else's older children who were trying to climb up the slide while Ben was trying to come down.

We ate dinner at home, put Izzie to bed, and then Grandma, Ben and I headed out to catch the fireworks. Ben was delighted to find there was also a bouncy castle. The lady said I could go in with him to help, so I did. We were having a grand time, but then Mommy bounced him a little too high, and crying ensued. He later announced to Grandma that, "Mommy bounced me too much," and "Mommy hurt me." He wanted to ride a train, but it had closed down for the night so we bought some cotton candy instead and found a rock by the water to watch the fireworks.



After the initial moments in which Ben thought the fireworks were coming to get him, he enjoyed the show and even asked for them again the next day, and the day after.



There was a lot of traffic afterwards and a security guard announced that nobody would be moving for at least an hour, so we stayed on our rock, talked, and ate some Kettle Corn that we had brought along. The last bit of excitement for the day was a train that parallelled us and whistled (honked its horn?) for about 30 seconds while it passed. Ben was alarmed by the noise and close proximity so Grandma and I made various comments of, "That was loud, wasn't it?" with huge smiles on our faces to show him it was fun and not scary. After that Ben's input was, "That train oh wake up Izzie!"