Fourth Fail

Alternate title for this post: "All Excitement for America's birthday gone. Apathy remains."

No this post is not about the fourth time I failed... but instead an account of our Family Picture Failure that happened on the Fourth of July.

As is tradition in the Kidder family, we all got dressed up and prepared to take a picture of our family on the 4th of July. Here we are the past two years:

July 4th, 2010

 July 4th, 2011

...Aaaand here we are this year: 

July 4th, 2012

Ahhhhhh hahahahahahahahaha!

Please excuse me while I go compose myself.....

Ok, I'm back. A few things played into the failure.... wind, bad timing, squirmy kiddos, wind, bright sunlight and did I mention wind? Oh well, we made a memory - I thought to myself, I can at least get a good picture of the kids right? 

Wrong....

 They. Would. Not. Smile.

 They were so apathetic. 

 Here is the closest thing to a smile I got from Lucy, but her legs are up, showing off her diaper cover..... ugh. 

(Maybe I can crop it and use it as a Facebook cover photo... hm, good idea!)

 Michael's expression! So funny! "Can I please go take a nap now mom?" This from my boy who usually lights up for the camera!

 I asked Lucy to hold Michael's hand, he would have nothing of it.... You can see both their dark brown eyes here really well here though. :)

We went to dinner at our friends Dan and Eden's house and then went to see Pampa's fireworks, celebrating Pampa's 100th birthday! We didn't go to the rodeo grounds, but parked with about 50 other cars along the road a good distance away. We were very surprised at the length of the show, we kept anticipating the finale, but it kept going! For a good 45 minutes! Both kids enjoyed the display - there were no tears (very surprising considering it started 2 hours past their bed time!).

We got home and had to give Ellie an emergency bath, she had enjoyed the firework show from the dirt with Lucy. :-/ But we had fun reading books and cuddling with Lucy while we waited.

So America's birthday ended well - I'm glad our earlier flop didn't define the whole day. :)

Have you ever had a family tradition fall apart into failure? Please do tell so I don't feel alone.