Fourth of July 2013}

Our first Independence Day in Webster Groves was a learning experience for sure. In the weeks leading up to the holiday, we kept learning more and more about all of the festivities around here. There is a parade, carnival rides, a pageant, fireworks, food vendors, and many, many private parties which seem to be a huge production. (In fact, we got an evite invitation to one party by a family from Drew's baseball team. I clicked open the invite list and there were 142 other people on it! Holy Moly!) We learned that people start the celebrations with the parade in the morning, hop from party to party all day, and then attend the fireworks that night.

The day before the parade, we saw multiple empty lawn chairs set up on the curb along the parade route; surprisingly, people were staking their claim for parade spots twenty four hours early! Because of this, we weren't sure what to expect about the size of the parade crowd.  We decided to give it a try, though, and headed downtown with our friends, the Millers, about an hour before the parade was due to begin. We were happy to find a parking spot really easily and then good spots for the parade just as easily. We enjoyed the parade and then came back to our house for lunch and homemade ice cream.  Our first Webster Fourth experience was a success.

Our second Webster Fourth experience was not so much. After spending the afternoon relaxing at home, we let the kids stay up late so we could head towards the fireworks. As we drove closer and closer to the area where the fireworks display was going to be, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. There were people everywhere. Everywhere. We drove around for almost 45 minutes straight trying to decide what we were going to do. We didn't actually cover much surface area in those 45 minutes, it was just difficult to get anywhere because there were people walking everywhere, cars frantically looking for spots and consequently driving really badly, and cars parked everywhere and making some streets almost impassible. It was a mess. We ended up just giving up and driving home since it was two hours after Drew's bedtime at that point. Sidenote- we were super proud of the kids for handling the disappointment so well. There were none of the tears I was bracing myself for.

Evidently in Webster you have to arrive for the fireworks a couple of hours early and expect that you will be stuck in a traffic jam once the night is over. Seeing twenty minutes of fireworks here is pretty much an entire evening production. Lesson learned for the future.

All in all, though, it was a great holiday for us. Hope your Fourth was a great one too!