Getting Into the Spirit

To get Elina into the 4th of July spirit, we signed her up for a Stars and Stripes half-day camp at a school. She and L got to go together so it was WAY fun. She came back with all sorts of fun crafts and said that her favorite part was making the crafts. (It's funny because L said the same thing.) She didn't really like the Uncle Sam mask though. She said, "I can't keep it on because I'm a girl and Uncle Sam is a boy." Oh well.

B had a nice 4-day weekend, so we started our fun on Thursday night with a game of Killer Bunnies with KT, her husband, her sister, and her brother-in-law. It was the first time we played with so many people and it was a great game. (Unfortunately, neither of us won. Boo.)

We spent Friday morning and afternoon making 4th of July crafts. Elina and I made pom poms, a star necklace, and some pinwheels. We also spent some time decorating Elina's tricycle and Eli's car. We were participating in a neighborhood 4th of July parade the next morning, so we needed their modes of transportation to be full of Independence Day spirit. Elina loved seeing her trike all "dressed up."
Then we made a red, white, and "blue" ice cream cake for the next day. We used strawberry sorbet, vanilla ice cream, and Acai berry sorbet. I've never made an ice cream cake, so this was lots of fun, albeit time-consuming. We had to wait for each tub of ice cream to soften before we could spread it out and mold it and wait for each layer to harden enough to put more ice cream on top. My "blue" layer didn't turn out quite as blue as I had wanted because I didn't follow the original recipe. The recipe called for making a blueberry syrup and adding it to vanilla ice cream. I saw this new flavor, Acai berry sorbet (that I've also been wanting to try out), that had a blue-violet tint, so I went with that to save time. So in the end our ice cream layer cake looked more like red, white, and purple....but no one really cared because it was still pretty and delicious. The vanilla layer gave the cake just enough creaminess and the 2 sorbet layers made it nice and fruity. (FYI, the Acai layer tasted like a grape sorbet...very yummy!) That evening, we braved the crowds and headed to Sea World to check out the Summer Nights program and possibly, the fireworks at night. Boy, was it hot! No matter what you did, you were just coated in this layer of sweat on every part of your body. (My friend S, who is also known as Sweat Girl, would've hated every single minute of it.) I wouldn't say that the shows were awesome, but they were ok. I think the heat just made it slightly less enjoyable. Seriously, when we were sitting in the packed auditorium waiting for the Shamu show to start I really felt like I wanted to leave and just go home. Eli just had a miserable face on the entire time. Toward the end of the show, Elina asked me, "When are we going to leave?" Even though Elina was miserable during the shows, she loved walking around and hanging out with L. Luckily, the babies were all losing it, so we decided to just head home and not stay for the fireworks. We figured we'd be ok since we planned to watch fireworks on base the next day (with KT and her fam, of course!).