Fabulous Fourth

We had a fantastically fabulous Fourth.
An incredible Independence day, if you will.

First Nana played silly games with the kids...

Nana always makes the babies smile.

Then we had fire works!

We got some fountains because they are fun, nastalgic and sparkly and we got some that shoot up in the air because those are illegal where we grew up so they were extra fun to buy.

Obadiah ate a whole sandwich all by him self for the first time. He's growing up so fast!!

And best of all, Julie came to visit for the weekend!

We took Julie black berry picking because we'd been wanting to do it.

It sounded fun, and we are trying to embrace and enjoy everything we can about living in this area, and living in the country. And we took Julie because she's fancy and from New York and we wanted to do something "country" with her.

Blackberry picking was SO. MUCH. FUN.

I will now post way too many pictures of our black berry picking day because it was so much fun and because we all look so cute doing it.

Obi slept for the first half...

Rosie was great at picking berries. She kept inspecting our buckets to make sure we didn't get any with any red on them.

And the bushes were so beautiful.

Rosie shows me what a ripe black berry looks like and tells me not to pick any with ANY red on them.  I got in trouble for that a couple of times.

Obi woke up and did a good job helping test to see of the berries were ripe enough.

Berry inspector

very thoroughly inspecting

aren't they so adorable!

very serious berry pickers

Very Best Friends

Cutest boy in the world

Silly girls...

Rosie and her Fairy God Mother (Julie's official title as of this trip)

William tried desperately to get us all looking at the camera and smiling

We gave him such a hard time. I love the face Obi is making in this one.

Obi and his Fairy God Mother

Julie did a good job showing the kids the geese (because Mommy is afraid of them) and talking to the kids about the chickens.

After a wonderful day at the berry farm we took Julie to THE place in town to eat... Dairy Queen!

Rosie waits patiently for her ice cream.

And the most popular restaurant in town is a hit

Then it was time to go home and do something with the 4 gallons of black berries we had collected. After eating a bunch of them, we decided to make black berry jam.

Nana was asked to keep Obi busy while we worked with the hot jam and boiling water and hot jars.

This is how that turned out.

Nana ended up pulling Obi though the house in a box. He was the happiest kid and just laid there contently for a good hour. Nana got a good work out that night.

And that was our fabulous fourth weekend.