4th of July Fireworks ... finally!

Last year GR starting working on his dream of getting a commercial fireworks license. It meant shadowing other licensed professionals multiple times, studying rules and laws, taking classes and of course, an exam. Late this spring he completed all the necessary requirement and started getting all the paper work together ... passing the test, getting licensed and insured, and then getting the permits to shoot them off a Diane's.

Thankfully it all came together beautifully, the fireworks were selected, ordered and picked up after the breakfast on the 4th ... GR had a permit to shoot, but not a permit to store, so they could only be picked up on the day of the shoot, if the shoot didn't happen, then the fireworks had to be packed back up and returned to their trailer in the middle nowhere Kansas that night.

We had a fun morning and afternoon of swimming and shooting off an assortment of my favorite daytime fireworks ... airplanes, tanks. I've decided these are my favorites because they aren't obnoxiously loud and they "do something" other than explode.

The weather was really warm and humid, so the kids barely made a dent in the collection GR and I purchased the night before. This is how GR and I have come to work the purchasing of fireworks. I will go with him, help him pick out what we want and need, then I leave to get the car and he pays for it. I could never support his love of the 4th of July if I truly knew the dollar amount of each item we exploded during the day.

By 3pm, GR started checking the weather radar constantly. Huge dark gray and black clouds started descending on us from the north cutting the outdoor daytime explosions short. And 45 minutes later, the tornado sirens were sounding and the pouring rain started. In hopes that everything would clear by evening we forged head with our plans and told the few people who knew how to reach us as Bob and Diane's that unless it was raining at 9pm, the show would go on!

Here's a faith promoting story that I want to record for our family history ... this account is written by my Mom, and was shared on her blog:

"As we were working [cleaning up the toy room at Grandma's house], we looked up through the windows of the toy room and saw dark clouds and then rain. Rebecca said, "My Dad is going to be so bummed if it rains!" ... I thought about it, and suggested to her that we have a prayer. "Explain all that to Heavenly Father," I said, "and ask Him if the rain could stop for the fireworks." Rebecca did just that. She offered a very simple and direct prayer. While I was still in the toy room, Rebecca went out to the kitchen and according to Kathleen, told her Dad not to worry: we'd had a prayer and everything would be all right. (Mary Ann said Rebecca was a little concerned that it was still raining at 5 pm and thought her prayer had not been answered.) But by 6:30, the rain had stopped and people were arriving and setting up lawn chairs..."

The boys started setting up their launching stations at 6:30 a full hour later than they'd hoped, so things were getting pretty stressful and hurried for everyone. But we had a great turn out of people for root beer floats, parachutes, sparklers and the big show.



The only way I have to judge on the number of people who attended is to look at the number of root beer floats I served. When you consider that not everyone had a float, and a good number of the kids came for a minimum of seconds, this isn't the most accurate way of counting, but from the crowd pictures I took, 144 could be close. For those interested we also went through 198 sparklers!



Although I'm pretty experienced at serving root beer floats in mass, I learn something new each year. This was the first year I actually accepted peoples offerings to bring either a box of ice cream or a 2-liter of root beer. I'm always a little reluctant to farm some of this out because, my formula is exact ... 1 box + 1 2-liter = 16, 8 oz. root beer floats. Things come up, stuff happens, and if one person who offered to bring something doesn't show, I'm in real trouble. I delegated out four boxes of ice cream and four 2-liters of root beer, but with the weather, my trust in others wavered and I decided I'd better be prepared to serve everyone ... at least half of my delegated items didn't show, but I had others bring either a box or 2-liter I wasn't expecting so we ended up with plenty for everyone and I didn't end up with too much left over. I still haven't decided how I'm going to handle offers to bring ice cream or soda next year...

This year we moved off the back deck and set up a table closer to the crowd and that proved very successful. We served a lot more floats than the year.

I've decided to switch to a 10oz cup instead of the 8oz. We were serving floats so quickly, the foam didn't have time to settle, and the root beer per portions weren't where the needed to be, this years floats were a bit lop sided ... heavy on the ice cream and a little light on the root beer ... I ended up with too much root beer left over.

The fireworks display was fantastic!! We got most of the show on video and we're trying to edit it all down so it will fit on U-Tube ... right now it's 14 minute, 4 minutes too long. Back to the drawing board. The fireworks where big and beautiful and perfect! No one got hurt, there were no scary miss fires, like we've had in the past, we had a great crowd even with the questionable weather - and the crowd loved it.

By 10pm the crowd was packed up and heading home, and by 11pm we had our stuff cleaned up, packed up and were heading home.

GR and "the boys" have already starting planning next years show, so mark your calendars, and plan to join us! They are going set up three firing stations instead of two to speed up the launching and they've decided to reduce crowd confusion they need to select smaller cakes (they had three, and which each cake, the crowd thought it was the finally).