So Much Fun, It Should Be Illegal

Our 4th of July celebration was one for the record books. And, by record books, I obviously mean the family albums, since, no one else is really all that interested in our family activities.

I am nothing if not self-aware.

Anyhoodle, we started the day early and ended it late. Chris, Jana, and the kids met us at the house at 7:30 a.m., and, after a quick stop at the grocery store for staples (bottled water, hair ties, headbands, raspberry-filled powdered donuts, you know, the essentials), we hit the lake.

We were joined by another couple and their family, so, between us, we had three boats, five tubes, one inflatable trampoline, ten wake boards, seven knee boards, seven kids, and only eight small bottles of wine.

Luckily, Jana and I were the only wine drinkers in the group.

And, while we never did make use of the inflatable trampoline, we did drink all the wine.

For some reason, I felt that is important to note.

And, I digress.

So, our first order of business was, of course, to knock as many children off the tubes as humanly possible. This effort was rewarded many, many times throughout the day, with small children and gangly teenagers skipping across the surface of the water at regular intervals.

We also attempted to knock as many adults off of wake boards and knee boards as possible but were slightly less successful since it is harder to skip across the lake while tethered to a large piece of fiberglass than it is to fly off a tube. We did manage a couple of epic crashes, however, and swamping someone is almost as fulfilling as catapulting them, in my honest opinion.

When we weren't on the water, we were exploring the dam spillway, not to be confused with the damn spillway, because, this is a family blog.

The teenagers especially love the spillway because the acoustics allow them to shout really, really loudly without hardly raising their voices at all. I especially love the spillway because, when asked to "pose like a super model", the children are, for some odd reason, more amenable to my requests.

After exploring the spillway, we engaged in some cliff-diving, or, in this case, some "jumping off really high rocks into water that had been deemed safe by two-out-of-three male adults". The third male adult was busy napping on a boat and could not be reached for comment.

We finally pulled the boats off the lake just as the sun began to set and made it home in plenty of time to eat dinner before crashing into bed, exhausted from an epic day on a fabulous (and, oddly unpopulated) lake with good friends, tasty food, and wine.

Because being free allows us the privilege of drinking wine.

Thank you, fore-fathers!