The fourth…

July 5, 2007 at 1:13 pm (Family)

I have been living in the US for seven years.  This July marks a significant anniversary for me.  It is the month that I moved here.  Shhh… I wasn’t supposed to be here until October.  Anyway, my first 4th of July celebration was 7 years ago, yesterday.

We had a lovely day.  It started with 4,298,430,003,220,009 loads of laundry.  Ha, you think I’m joking!  So cute.  Michael cleaned the inside of his truck and wiped off the sunscreen that Brody sprayed on the outside of the truck.  We washed the parts to the car seats – it was akin to an archeological dig.  You carefully sweep through one layer, not wanting to disturb the layer beneath it. 

Michael has never really cleaned in his lifetime.  He says he’s cleaned before – but I know better. Being a girl (and a kid) I cleaned a lot when I was growing up.  My mom is an excellent housekeeper and can clean anything.  I learned a lot from her and to this day my cleaning skills will never compare to hers.  One reason for that, is that I just don’t care enough to be “super” clean. 

She loves the white glove test and will perform it with her own hidden glove that she keeps in her purse.  Mom also loves to tell me that my housecleaner isn’t very good and probably encourages my father to take a jab once in a while.  The point is, I know clean.  Michael was trying to scrub sunscreen, greasy oily hard to remove sunscreen, from the exterior of his truck with water.  I think there might have been soap involved – but I came outside half way through his task.  He eventually got it out based on my suggestion that he use a grease cutter like windex.  I think he felt accomplished (he did an amazing job), I certainly hope he did because his truck looked like a group of 15 teenagers lived in it for the past year. 

Ahh… i digress

We then went to Michael’s parents house for a BBQ.  I thought it was going to be a family bbq but between Michael and I – we only knew about 5 people.  Jeff and Heather showed up, we ate and then headed off to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom to watch the fireworks.  The latest news at SFDK is that Thomas the Tank Engine town finally opened!  It’s a cool little spot for kids and seemed to be the happening place if you were a 4 year old boy.  Michael waited in line with the boys so that they could ride the Harold the Helicopter ride.  I bet he was in line for about 40 minutes.  With all three boys.  By himself (I know, he’s a saint!).  Michael was almost fed up and POOF! it was their turn!  The timing was amazing!  A chocolate milkshake was definitely in order after that! 

We started lining up for the fireworks at Chabot Stadium at around 8:00 pm.  I hate crowds.  I especially hate crowds in a line.  I get anxious, snippy, unmanageable, cruel and irritated.  So. Easily. Irritated.  Plus, the crowd in this line were the lowest of the low.  We had a few people who were respectful of space etc.  Most of them were this close to getting a pop in the head. 

I think it’s pretty bad when the stadium attendees are yelling at grown adults to stop running! stop running!  This is NOT Nascar ™ for goodness sakes!  Why are people running over fireworks?  I was not in a rush to run to my seat just so that I could sit for the next hour and a half waiting.  While seated, I was amazed at the number of people who wanted us to “scootch over” and give up our amazing spots.  Spots that we had waited for over an hour and half for.  Uh… I don’t think so.  Nice try though! Buh-bye. 

The fireworks were awesome!  We loved every minute of them.  It made up for all the nasty people surrounding us.  Until it was time to leave of course!  That’s when all hell broke out again!

We ended up getting home at around 10:45 pm and you can imagine the state of my children this morning.  It was scary!  I was actually scared for my life!  So far though, only one phone call saying how bad they are behaving.  One call… not bad.