The 4th

The fire crackers exploded, thick smoke filled the humid air and fireworks burst in a myriad of colors in the night sky. My four year old cousin Emma looked up at the gigantic fireworks exploding above us and exclaimed with excitement, "Look! Sparklers!"
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This Fourth of July my family went over to our cousins' house and celebrated our countries  independence (and the birthday of our nine year old cousin, Morgan) the way it should be celebrated; with cake and lots of explosions! We started out while the evening was still young with the noisy stuff, and had a great deal of fun trying to destroy toy soldiers, you wouldn't believe how durable those things are. Although I felt somewhat guilty when my mom compared us to the kid from Toy Story.

Eventually, after it got dark, we started lighting the fireworks. Unfortunately, I never seemed to get used the the sound the fireworks made when they went off, and every time one exploded I would utter a little shriek and jump.But I still had a great deal of fun, and I discovered that I greatly love blowing things up. We also lit sparklers (on of my personal favorites, they just look so pretty) and I loved watching Emma cautiously wave the sparkler around her, as if she weren't quite sure that it wouldn't explode.

All in all I had a great time on Sunday. But before I leave you, and get back to ignoring the world before detasseling starts, I'm going to tell you about one last, rather humorous, occurrence. As we were setting off fireworks two boys across the street started to light their own, more impressive, fire works. As we watched them explode in the sky above our heads (with me giving the occasional jump of surprise when particularly loud ones went off) Allyson, the oldest of the cousins, and I got into an argument about how old the boys were. I though they were 15 or 16 and she thought they were closer to 18. In order to settle the argument, Megan, another cousin, told Morgan to go and ask the boys how old they were and gave her specific instructions not to tell them that we had asked her to do it. She happily ran off to go ask the boys their age, and we waited patiently for her return. When she did finally return, she did so by running toward us exclaiming, in a not so quiet whisper, that the boys were (like I had guessed) 16 years old. Well, this didn't fail to attract the notice of the two teenage boys, and after they threw a few surreptitious glances at us, we started laughing about how they probably thought we liked them. A little while later, the incident with the boys forgotten, we went on a walk; although five minutes after we started out, we stopped walking, and started skipping (yes, skipping). We had been skipping for a little while (and probably looking like complete idiots) when this car pulls up to a stop sign, and honks it's horn at us. Well, the simple fact that a car had come upon us while we were looking like fools would have been amusing enough in and of it's self. But as the car pulled away, we realized that the occupants of the car were in fact the very same 16 year old neighbor boys from earlier in the evening.

Well,  I think I have written enough for now, and I have a book that is calling to me. So until next time, au revoir.

~Nat