4th of July...The Simple Way

Since our vacation plans were canceled, instead of putting together a ton of new plans for a busy weekend I decided not to make this holiday very complicated.

We had a VERY simple BBQ at home with grilled chicken, steak, and watermelon. Here's a typical picture of my kids, IK and LA smiling nicely and EJ angry at something as usual. This is a very common look for her.

One of SD's favorite meals I make for special occasions is flank steak pinwheels with roasted red peppers and fresh spinach leaves wrapped in bacon covered in a creamy blue cheese dressing with a side of artichokes. But that meal is also very expensive, so instead we made a knock off version and grilled some cheaper steak, roasted sweet red peppers and made the blue cheese sauce.

I'm not a blue cheese fan really at all, but this steak dressing is simply amazing!!! And for a modifed version of this recipe it still tasted awesome! It was a lot less work to prepare and still a special treat.

After dinner we headed out to see some fireworks in a local baseball stadium. They always have an awesome show that's set to patriotic music every year. And since you're sitting in a baseball stadium up in the bleachers you can see tons of other fireworks displays all around in the background of the horizon.

The show was simply beautiful, even though it was accidentally cut much shorter than expected. One of the large fireworks ended up coming back down to the ground much sooner and hitting one of the next displays creating a very big problem which resulted in shutting down the rest of the show...as in we missed out on another 17 min. of amazing fireworks they had planned because of a malfunction that could have resulted in a major fire.

Some of the people in the crowd were really disappointed, but there was nothing that could be done about it, sometimes accidents just happen. We weren't upset about it at all, we saw 10 min. of awesome fireworks, the kids had a great time, and all in all it was a very enjoyable evening.

Having a very plain, simple 4th wasn't so bad at all this year. Next year we'll look forward to doing more, but this was fine for now. Hope you had a great 4th of July too!