And My Glare at the Red Rockets

I have been sort of dreading the Fourth of July since last year, when our neighbors kept us up until 1 a.m. with intermittent fireworks displays mostly consisting of illegal roman-candle type pieces. I wouldn’t really care about the fact that they’re illegal except that they are really loud and tend to keep anybody in the neighborhood from sleeping.

But we were pleasantly surprised when the pyrotechnics had pretty much died down by 11:30 or so. And we certainly needed a good night’s sleep. We went up Mill Creek Canyon with my family in the afternoon. My dad and I hiked up a trail to an overlook of the Salt Lake Valley while Sam played in the creek (with his mom’s supervision, of course).

Then last night Sam wanted to play with his toy called an Alphabet Pal, which is sort of a caterpillar-shaped thing that sings the ABC song and has a different letter on each foot that you can press to get the name of the letter. He just started pushing on those and then repeating the letter. It was really astonishing. I’m amazed at how fast he’s picking things up all of a sudden.

All in all, we had a pretty good day. Now if I can just survive the noise of the 24^th of July…