4th of July

Warning: there are a lot of pictures in this post.

Disclaimer: I take a lot of pictures. There will usually be a lot of pictures in my posts. And this one has a lot so my family can steal copies of the ones they want, if they want.

Fourth of July weekend, we didn't have to go anywhere because most of my family came to our place! We love it when people visit us.

Playing bocce ball around our yard.

Having fun in Matt's hammock.

Matt slept in his hammock all night--this is the next morning.

Landon carrying Avery on our way to the 4th of July parade.

Grammie and the kids waiting for the amazing parade.

More of the group (Drake even got to sit next to a friend from our ward).

Later we set up our little pool because it was such a hot day.

This is my brother Nathan and his wife Adrienne's little boy.

Meet Jayden.

He has amazingly blue eyes.

Early that evening, we thought it would be fun to all float down the river in Lava Hot Springs. The weather didn't look very promising, but by the time we got there, it had stopped raining (and hailing) and turned out to be perfect weather.

I'd never floated down Lava, so I didn't know what to expect.

Had I walked the course beforehand, I probably wouldn't have let Drake or Graham go down... especially with the high water.

My mom took Drake, and I took Graham.

Long story short, we both flipped and had a hard time getting out until someone else came to help us.

After that, I decided to stay out of the water with my kids and just take pictures of everyone else having fun.

At least one or two people would flip every single time they came down.

Despite the flipping and scraping along the rocks under the water, people still had fun.

And the boys were plenty content just watching.

Shad was pretty good at keeping himself afloat.

I'm not sure if Trent tried much to stay afloat...

It was almost as much fun to watch them as it was to be in the water.

Avery and Grammie.

After the river, we went back to our place and caught this double rainbow. Although the weather in Lava was nice for us, it poured and poured in Pocatello and Chubbuck--more than it has since we've lived here. The streets and lawns were flooded pretty good, and Shad and some of my family spent some time hauling buckets of water out of our window wells to prevent any problems.

Then we had a BBQ. This is the only picture of it because I was actually busy helping out--weird, I know.

We drove out to watch the firework show from a park somewhere, but also did some just on our street.

And you can't have a fourth of July without sparklers.

It was fun to have my family here. Most of them left on Sunday, but we're glad they could stay as long as they did. And I know this picture has nothing to do with the 4th of July, but oh well.

Any time anyone wants to come visit/stay with us for any amount of time, know you're welcome. We're at least a two-star hotel.