We Did It...and Survived!!!

Fourth of July rolled around last week and I thought I'd share how we celebrate America Chicago style!

The morning began with a little parade in our Hyde Park community.  It is called an "everybody's in it, nobody sees it" parade.  Well not having much clue of what was going on we watched it from our apartment window.  It made for pretty good seats.  This was one CrAzY parade!

Yes there was ONE person handing out candy to the few people on the sidewalks.

No joke...everyone was in it!

Age didn't matter!!!

 The parade ended in a park in our community.  They had many fun activities for kids.  Patrick and I walked down to see what was going on and I ended up seeing 3 of my kids and one co-worker.  

Later that afternoon we headed downtown with everything in tow for the rest of the night.  Our first stop was to find me new shoes for work.  It's hard because they have to be closed toe shoes and let's be honest who wears closed toe shoes in the summer?  We ended up finding these gems!

I know...pretty awesome

After finding shoes we picked up our subway and made our way to Navy Pier.  We had no idea what we were getting into.  We loaded into a packed bus and what was suppose to be about a 10-15 min bus ride took nearly an hour.  We hopped off and found a perfect patch of grass right next to the water.  I could hardly believe it.  Was it too good to be true?  I'll let the pictures do the talking...

Our beautiful view and patch of grass

Dinner for two

We were sitting right next to the Navy Pier sign

Notice all the room Patrick has to spread out...remember that for later....

We even had entertainment pass by us.

Does this say teacher of Preschoolers?  I brought our own entertainment.

All of a sudden (within a half hour) this quickly became our view...uh what happened?

This was about the point when they closed Navy Pier because it was at max capacity! 

So as you can see we ended up having our beautiful patch of grass taken away and simply joined the rest of the crowd standing to watch the fireworks because there was no room to stand.  When they ended, Patrick grabbed my hand and this small girl ducked and dodged the crowd.  I am proud to say we were home by 11!!!  Was it worth the crazy amounts of people? Yes!  Would I do it again?  Probably not.

Hope you had a very happy and safe Fourth of July.