Forth of July

The forth of July? When you are home cleaning the house on July 3rd and your neighbor calls you from vacation in Park City to see if they need to come home and grab personal belongs for possible evacuations. The idea of fireworks to celebrate the forth of July does not sit well. While on the phone with my neighbor (who was in park city and could see the smoke) I opened the door to see this...

 I was oblivious in my cleaning world and knew nothing about a fire near by. I panic for a moment because it looks as though the fire is going to come right over the mountain straight for our house. After packing up an emergency bag and having all of our personal belongings (scrapbooks, etc) ready to go in a box I decided I better find out more information concerning the "Quail Fire."

It turns out the fire looked much closer than it actually was. It happen to be in Alpine and was just on the other side of highway 92 and heading the opposite direction. I still left my bags all packed and ready because you never know what could happen. Below is a picture we took while heading to one of our favorite parks in Alpine later that week. While we had all gone to play at the park the boys loved sitting on the grass watching the helicopters dump water  to contain the fire.

Clearly I did not take this picture but it is amazing. I pulled it from KSL News but I am not sure who actually took the photo.

So, the forth of July? We are both very grateful for our freedom and for those that have made so many sacrifices for us. However we also strongly believe that fireworks were not the appropriate way to celebrate our independence in Utah this year. We discussed the Declaration of Independence as a family (I happen to have a poster) and talked about being patriotic. We also talked about our friend Dave that is currently serving in Afghanistan, Cisco who is in Germany, and Justin who is getting ready to head to Japan. After a brief explanation about each of them to Ian he pondered for a moment then said, "So, they are like superheros! Wow!" I loved it!

Many of the cities in Utah have restricted the use of fireworks, Cedar Hills being one of them. The kids headed to bed at 8:30 pm on July fourth.  Tim and I stayed up late that night and enjoy watching a few fireworks out in the valley but it mostly just made us nervous. Especially when Tim caught some younger boys trying to light fireworks in our backyard. I think I will keep our emergency bags packed and ready to go all summer long. I took this picture from our deck. Happy Birthday America!!!