The day started at 6am with a 4yo at the side of my bed.

“It’s fireworks day” she announced with those bright blue eyes.

I rubbed my one good eye1 and looked at the clock that still displayed the ungodly hour. I should not be awake.

But I was. She was all like “let’s go!”. Like NOW.

I explained that it wasn’t like that and we still had hours to go before the fireworks were about to begin. We had to watch some YouTube, play outside, do some stuff around the house and have dinner before we could go watch the fireworks.

But she was ready. very very ready.  A few nights prior she was afraid of the neighbors fireworks so much that we ended  up buying her some noise cancelling ear muffs so she wouldn’t be afraid and come running to our bed for help nightly and now, in the early mornings of July 4 she’s ready and raring to go.

We made it somehow to dinner and then we were off. We packed blankets, snacks and drinks and made sure everybody went potty. We found that there were free fireworks available at the park on the river so that seemed to be a good choice.

We arrived with loads of time to spare and set up camp and shared some snacks while we waited for dusk for the fireworks to begin:

And then it started to get dark. We’re almost ready to go! Just a few more minutes!

Wait! I hear something! It's the fireworks!

Wait. Where are they? I don’t see them. I hear them….but ….Oh, here they are…

Behind a TREE!

Who was the smarty pants that decided to put the fireworks at the other end of the river? They should be fired from public works.

You should have heard the complaints from all the others like us who thought that we would be at a relatively good vantage point. It really spoiled the mood, that’s to be sure. And things were going great beforehand too. One group of young girls shared a glow stick with a little boy next to them. There was a sense of community.

We packed up our belongings and tossed them in the trunk so that I could carry her on my shoulders and after walking a quarter of a mile with a 4 year old on my shoulders 2 we finally found a somewhat okay vantage point.

By this  time it was well past all our bedtimes and so we started home in the traffic full of disgruntled fireworks (non) viewers. The  saddest part about all this was that we saw more (and better) fireworks on the way home from our neighbors than we did at the official event.

We should have stayed home.