Memorial Day and Chia Pets

We went over to Nana and Ye-Ye's house today for some great traditions, one of them being a fantastic and filling meal!  The house was all decorated, and in fact we were all decorated too, dressed in patriotic red, white and blue.  Nana and Ye-Ye had all kinds of great food on the table, including grilled burgers - and the highlight, crab legs.  Oh my, those crab legs were amazing.  That's one of the greatest meals you can have, sitting and cracking open the legs, talking and tasting all that crab meat dipped butter.  Yummy!

After eating, it was time for another family tradition!

Tossing water balloons with large pool towels!  I'm not exactly sure when this started, but we had a whole lot of water balloons, and we thought we'd try this out, tossing it from team to team.

Inevitably, there'd be some misses, especially when some teams would launch the balloon so incredibly high that it became a bit of a challenge to catch it without it popping.  And yes, a lot of them were popping.

And you could never blame one person or the other for an errant shot.  So some of these shots would go astray, and right at each other...

And that of course evolved into the other great family tradition:  the squirt gun battles.

We were armed with lots of water balloons and squirt guns, and the weather was amazingly hot outside.  It was a perfect combination, and a great chance to immediately cool off.  Everyone was out there with these modern squirt guns, these miniature water cannons.  Daddy tried running around with two, sort of like Lara Croft.  Jonathan was doing his version of Rambo, with two machine-gun style water guns.  Madison was going after everyone, and Hannah didn't have a dry spot on her.  Nana and Ye-Ye were involved too, of course, once Nana got a large-sized water gun in her hands.  It's always good fun, and for some reason we reserve these big squirt gun fights for those patriotic holidays.

Afterwards we were inside for some dessert, which included Mommy's very own pineapple upside down cake, which has been the perfect treat.  We dried off and sat about sharing and talking while having dessert, and basically catching up on all the recent things going on.  Everyone's been busy, and will be busy the next few weeks.  The others are taking a trip to Yellowstone, and of course we have Summer Xtreme.

We got home that night, and watched some television, and were ready for bed a little quicker than normal.  It was a fun and memorable day.  A few days ago, we started a Chia pet - one we got as a gag gift at Christmas time.  It is a Statue of Liberty Chia Pet, one Madison and Daddy set up.  It's coming along nicely, along with another Chia Pet friend we also started.  We'll close this post with some pictures of both.  Happy Memorial Day!

"Give us your tired, your poor, your huddle Chia Pets."

"Hey now.  You're an all-star."

Shrek brings back memories.  It was in 2011 that we last put those seeds on this Shrek face.  Madison was so young back then, five years old.  Now here we are, another eight years later... wow.