Fireworks.

It stopped raining long enough yesterday for us to watch fireworks at Memorial Park with Mike and Connie and the kids, who left this morning to go back to SD. We parked down by Zorbadillos (one of my favorite restaurants ever; I'm biased) and sat near the lake.

The girls were antsy, to say the least. "Is it time yet?"* I had to laugh. These girls, they aren't actually blood relations, but you can't really tell. Mine's brunette and the others are blonde, but they were picking on each other like sisters all day yesterday.

I don't know how many people were there, but it was more than the population of most South Dakota towns. Maybe even most SD towns added together, say, if you left out the top ten. People were restless, too. The walkway around the lake was packed with people. People with cell phones. People with dogs. People hawking red, white, and blue glow sticks. People with strollers. People with wheelchairs. Even what looked like Amish folks, only the ladies didn't have the white cap thingies. There was no sitting still, not even during the fireworks themselves.

Maybe it's blasphemy to say this, but the fireworks, when they did get started, lasted too long. Not the fault of the planners; everything went smoothly as far as we could tell (no flaming bodies shot off into the lake or anything). It's just that there were two very wiggly little girls on my lap through almost the whole thing, two little girls who each had butts over 50% of my own, and third who wanted attention, too. So I sat cross-legged on the ground and balanced the two little ones each to a leg and leaned the other one up against my side...and today my thighs hurt, almost as if I had been (shudder) working out.

But I'm glad I went. Lee offered to let me stay home, but I knew I'd just be whining about not going if I did that. And lo, it was fun.

(It's rained so much over the last few days that the countryside is minty, i.e., the color "mint" rather than the flavoring. Yellow-brown, yellow-brown, yellow-brown, mint. It's strange.)

*By the way, Mike said he timed the girls on the way out here. Twenty-two minutes to the first "Are we there yet?"