Flashback Fourth

I have so many wonderful childhood memories from celebrating Independence Day with my family! Today I'm going to have you step into my world -- a journal that I kept as a log book and outlet to record my daily life as a kid! I want to welcome you to my Composition Notebook! I actually have quite a stack of these ol' notebooks, filled with stories that make me smile and laugh, full of nostalgia! Where will I flashback today? To an illustrated version of what I wanted to remember from 14 years ago, July 4th, 2000.

I started with my classic date heading with the 2000 overlapping like the Olympic rings and description of what I was wearing. And of course, it was a tie-dye red, white, and blue shirt! Proud and Patriotic!

I love the part in the above pages where both my mom and dad are present -- Mom reading to us in the pool! In the water, who could believe that? She was so cool and risky! And then my dad, washing the car and shooting some hoops with my sister -- if you can make it out in my handwriting, I'm pretty impressed by him!

I wrote of the 300 fireworks my neighbors had purchased, a solo man-and-his-dog canoe trip that I felt was pretty epic, and a passage of scripture that I was memorizing, Psalm 119:17-19. So far, I haven't memorized the whole thing, who knows if I ever will, but I still have the first 42 verses committed to memory, and believe it or not, but there's even a tune to go with it! I am blessed by my hard work as a youth memorizing scripture. Psalm 119-- that was just one I decided to memorize on my own to see how far I could get! You were a pretty cool kid, Andrea Greene -- I have a lot to learn from that age of myself!

And now, page 4 -- the FIREWORKS and our family tradition...the MUMMY ROLL! Each year we always went to the same place to watch fireworks as a family, a large grassy hill where we would await the show. My dad would bring a large raggedy quilt and we knew that the wait for dark skies would be filled with dizziness and laughter! We would lay down on one end of the quilt, get all rolled, tucked, and wrapped up, and then pushed down the hill like little mummies unraveling right at the foot of the hill! Whew! We'd get going quite fast down that big hill -- oh, the Mummy Roll!

My quirky tales of the 4th are complete with fireworks taped in the pages, drawings of some sort of antenna-ed representation of my family, weather, trampolines, canoes, kittens, and 3-legged dogs! The important part about it all, my family was found throughout those pages, and all of my daily journal pages, for that matter. Sometimes I am struck when I see my son or other kids experiencing new things and remember...this is their childhood! Be present in the pages of their story, how they would tell it! Read to them in the pool, wash the car -- but then shoot some hoops, roll them down the hill and watch in amazement as sparks burst through the sky in remembrance and celebration!