4th of July Party

Lexie & Joseph are expert party planners. They are so much fun & come up with such fun ideas, it really is amazing & makes us smile. On Sunday, our primary chorister did little toilet paper rolls/tissue paper firecrackers with confetti & songs inside that the kids got to "pop" & then we'd sing the song. Right when we got home from church, Lexie & Joseph were off in Liza's room working on party stuff making their own firecrackers. I had my doubts on how they would be able to do this themselves & also do it without creating a huge mess thus making it hard for me to get Liza to bed. Boy, was I surprised! We called them down for dinner & they hurried back up to work on more things & then down for scriptures/bedtime & they tried to squeeze every minute out of us to keep working. When I told them they needed to clean up, it was done & done so well with everything put away in little shoe boxes in the closet for them to work on the next day. And work they did. Every morning, day, afternoon & evening when we didn't have something else planned they were working on their party. On Tuesday they asked me for needles, thread, & scrap material so they could do some sewing. Joseph has never used a needle before but Lexie would  make fairy clothing for her friends at knitting club sometimes so she had an idea of what she was trying to do. They did great & I only had to help Joseph with threading the needle & Lexie taught him the rest. They gave me a list of fruits they needed me to buy more of at the store for juice they were making & we just got to be surprised this morning. 

Lexie & Joseph got up around 4:45am to begin setting up for the party. And here it is!

Since we had the ward breakfast at 8 & Rick needed to be over to help set up/cook early we didn't have too much time this morning to get started, but we did have time for the firecrackers & singing of some 8 patriotic songs. 

They did a great job of remembering to bring out the trash can to catch the confetti. I cannot believe that they kept Liza's room so clean considering all of the little pieces of paper they cut up & put into these toilet paper rolls. Awesome!

Liza loved the firecrackers, too!

Then we headed off to the breakfast & once we came back we had lunch with the juice they made for us this morning & played some more games. The juice was quite interesting. They used water, oranges, strawberries, & blueberries. It was...creative. They made a "Bean Bag Blast" game where we had to get 20 points as quickly as we could & they timed us to see who won.

Here are the prize ribbons.

They even decorated the box holding the bean bags they made.

And here are the bags. "BBB" stands for Bean Bag Blast. I love how Lexie even stitched a B onto one of the bags.

After that we played a trivia game with questions about America like how many white/red stripes on the flag, what are 3 symbols of America, America's colors & such. And after you got one right you got another piece of paper with positive affirmations like "Great!" "You're correct!" "Good job!" or "I couldn't have said it better myself." That sure made us smile.

Eliza was taking a nap during these 2 games so once she woke up, Lexie taught her how to do the bean bag toss & Eliza loved it!

We love how creative & independent these kiddos are & how they find so much joy in trying to make everyone happy. They certainly love our country & our family & we certainly love them right back.