Happy July 4!

My daughter goes to bed before fireworks start around our area, so we aren’t doing a lot with her this year to celebrate the 4th of July. I put her in a celebratory red shirt, white pants, and blue hat, but doesn’t really understand yet that there’s any significance to that. Maybe next year when she’s about 3.5 she’ll have put the pieces together mentally to make the connection.

If your kids are in a similar situation, see how you can get them to engage with the holiday, whether it’s specific to the 4th like pointing out the colors and flags or to having a holiday, like engaging in the social aspects of a cookout.

On our walk today my daughter and I stopped to look at flags in people’s yards. I believe a local company had planted little plastic flags in many yards, so she stopped to look at those. By that I mean she stopped at the first one to investigate what it was. I thought that was cute and a good learning opportunity so I explained a bit about the holiday and the flags. I stopped the educational attempt by the fourth flag. She sat down beside each one from about the 10–15th flags. Then we moved on to pointing the rest of them out. It was a long walk but in kind of a funny way. Sometimes I need to find my inner peace a bit and make the choice to be patient rather than force us as a family to adhere to an arbitrary schedule in my head. “Hey, self, it’s okay if we turn a half hour walk into an hour.”

Even though she goes to bed to see the real thing, I may try to let her watch a few minutes worth of fireworks online. YouTube has a lot of videos like the one below.

Wishing everyone a safe, happy holiday!