I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-(C-E)

As I stated previously, the 3 day weekend summer holidays are some of my favorites and no matter how much or little we do, I always feel the need to try and capture them on here.  Luckily for the birth of our great nation I seemed to be a little bit more on top of my camera game.  Not much though.

We started our holiday weekend festivities off by deciding to attend our first school picnic/event at Emery's school on Thursday July 3rd.  Prior to this she had always been in the infant class and we didn't feel like she was old enough to really understand or interact anyway.  Unfortunately, the weather was awful and the picnic got moved inside.  On the one hand this meant reduced attendance but on the other it meant more BBQ for the Martin clan.  I think Ryan and Emery chalked this up as a point in the win column.

I thought we were gone for the day.  How did we end up back here Mama?

Daddy- you sit right here.

I love this nugget enough to plant my pregnant behind in a chair made for a pre-schooler.  That's a whole lot.

Perhaps the only documented picture of Ryan with his eyes open when someone else's aren't.

Friday morning was July the 4th and we decided to start it off like any good Americans- at Cracker Barrel.  Some choose to get tattoos of bald eagles- we choose to eat our body weight in bacon, pancakes, flaky biscuits and other breakfast goodies.  The love of America is a many-splendored thing.

Hmmm?  Were you saying something, Dad?  I was just thinking about biscuits.

Yeah, yeah.  You guys keep trying to distract me with these checkers but how can I focus when I know the eggs are juuuuust inside those doors?  (You may think I'm exaggerating but this kid looooooves herself some breakfast.  "Mo," "mo," "mo!" is about all that she says once she hits the seat.)

Our little business professional getting some last minute work in on her puppy laptop.

After breakfast, we hit the road for Conroe to go play with Nonnie, Grampa, the Herndons, Rachel, Morgan & Uncle Matt.  Per usual, I got way too relaxed hanging out with everyone and forgot to take pictures.  Also because it's been many moons and pregnancy brain ago- I can't even recall exactly what all we did.  If it helps you to feel like all my posts don't all sound the same, we'll pretend that we slayed dragons and had deep discussions on how to end world hunger.  It's more likely that we ate too much, drank too much and laughed way too much though, but hey- I aim to please around here.

Her face foreshadows exactly how successful putting her in that float will be.  It lasted 5 seconds.  If America is free, she wanted to be too.

Dad, that shark looks a lot like Grampa.

It was BYOB in the pool this weekend, clearly.

My amazing Mama made me my very own pitcher of virgin margs.  I hope I'm half as incredible to my daughters as she is to us.

Thank you muchly to all who participated in the making of another fantastic birthday for our great nation.  I look forward to many, many more!