Fireworks from the 4th! Yay!!

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY FLOKS!!!!! I hope you've had a fantabulous, fun, and safe day!

I'm posting our day backwards, just because that's the way the pictures loaded into my computer. And I'm posting a few times because I can only get a small number of pictures per post, but I wanted to share our day with all our family and friends. 

So I'll start with the fireworks!

In case you didn't know, we live in a very small town. We're not a city, we're a town. We don't even have stop signs or stop lights on the main road, Highway 203. Just make sure you slow down in the 2 school zones when the lights are flashing. The middle school is on the south end of town and the elementary is on the north. We take the safty of our kids seriously. You will get nailed if you speed, maybe not the first time, but the police are there often. ANYWAY...

Our small town is in between 2 cities and every year, the city to the north of us, Duvall, has a celebration the beginning of June (It's called Duvall Days). The city south of us, Fall City, has a celebration in August (Yup... Fall City Days). Carnation, our town, gets the 4th of July, and we do it big. We have a parade, and all sorts of other fun activities downtown. They even close Highway 203 through town and send drivers through a detour. After the parade, the festivities move down to Tolt McDonald Park... which is practically in our backyard.  For the rest of the day, there is live music and all sorts of things going on at the park. And then at 10 pm, they start the fireworks.

We don't have to go to the park to hear the music, it's loud enough for us to hear it at our home. And what's better is that we don't have to go to the park to see the fireworks. The town officials set those off practically in our backyard. Heck, we don't even have to leave the house if we don't want to. We have this one window that frames the section of sky the fireworks are in PERFECTLY! Well tonight, we set up our chairs, some blankets, a little table for my camera and tripod at 9:45, and then sat ready for the show.

Sissy and Eli had fun ooohing and ahhhing over the beautiful 'fire flowers' with their friend Hong Ngoc. And to insure that Oscar, our poodle, wasn't scared in the house alone, Matt brought him out. This was the first year Eli made it through an entire fireworks display without falling asleep. Sissy had to make sure she told all the neighbors outside with us why we call fireworks 'fire flowers', the name she gave fire works when she was a baby. And as for Oscar... about 15 minutes into the display, he calmed down enough to stop trying to climb out of Matt's lap and into mine. (He's a Mama's boy dog.) Then the finally started and Oscar tried to climb over Matt's shoulder to get away. It was pretty funny.

I've seen a lot of blogs, articles, and message board posts this last week about how to take great pictures of fireworks. I read all about my camera's fireworks setting. I even made a special trip to the Target in Redmond for a new tripod. I took a few practice shots and figured the best course of action for me, my surroundings and my camera. I think I did pretty good with my p&s digital camera, what do you think? Remember, like all the pictures on my blog, if you click on the picture, you can make them bigger. The first 2 bellow are my favorites. Enjoy!