Finally, my Fourth of July post, which has been delayed thanks to technical difficulties mostly beyond my control.  I say mostly because the biggest one, bringing my camera sans memory card because they were all at home in other camera bags or still lodged in my computer, was completely within my control.  Thankfully, Will & Mollie lent me a memory card – well not so much the card, Will said to use his new waterproof camera and that’s when I decided I could just swap the card out between his camera and my own all weekend, which is how there are some cool shots like this one.

Will suggested the pictures could be uploaded to his computer, he’d burn them to a disc and I’d be on my happy way home.  Only that plan didn’t work, and after several attempts at sending them through various internet ways and means, Mollie was finally successful last night.  Thank you Mollie.  For all four hundred and eleven of them.  Clearly, I like to document from every angle.  Don’t worry friends, I’m not going to make you sit through a slide show of our entire weekend, just the highlights.

Will dubbed the weekend “Oysterfest in July” because we all headed to their place in Urbanna for the long Fourth of July weekend.  There were some similarities between our July weekend and the November one, among them, shellfish caught off Will’s dockwhich in this case, were crabs steamed in the back yard

and eaten with some of their local friends in addition to our gang.

Urbanna might be a town of 500, but they certainly love their parades.  The Fourth of July parade actually took place on the Fifth of July, on the water.

Boats were decked out in their finest patriotic flair.

We watched from Will’s boat.

By the way Mollie, as Edie looked at these shots, she found her water bottle.

She did leave it on the boat. That blue one on the dash, to the left.

Of course we brought flair for our boat too. Although we were not quite as decked out as the boats in the parade. Didn’t want to steal their thunder you know.

It was a gorgeous, gorgeous day on the water.  Not a cloud in the sky, 70 degrees. We all had to scramble to find sweaters & jackets to wear to watch the fireworks that evening.

Speaking of fireworks….Will’s boat is housed in the boathouse behind the LOVE sign there, across the river from the marina. When we drove over there to get on the boat to watch the parade that afternoon, we came across the guys setting up the fireworks, right there, in the field behind the love shack.

Which will be known as product from now on.  That was the lower section, which was not as much product as the big guns on the hill above.

There was far more beach time down by the river this weekend as well.

The remnants of Hurricane Arthur had the beach on the river resembling the beach at the ocean, with little white caps and wind that whipped the sand.

By Saturday, it had calmed down considerably.

This sums up what we did on the beach for two days.  At least, it sums up what I did.

That was not all we did though.

There were puppy snuggles with Ryan & Rieman’s new pup.

The boys spent a good bit of time pouring over lego books when not climbing trees. Like November’s Oysterfest, there was always a pile of kids somewhere.

The girls did their own share of reading too.

Walker babe at 22 months is quite the chatterbox.  Most of his sentences consist of two words – an action word and ‘it’.  As in, ‘hit it’, ‘kick it’, ‘read it’, ‘open it’, ‘get it’ and my personal favorite, ‘crack it’.

As Rieman and I had made ourselves cozy at a crab picking table, Walker walked up to me declaring, “Crack it!  Crack it!”  Did he want me to pick him a crab?  “Uh-huh”. I’m pretty sure he’s thisclose to figuring out how to do it on his own.

I tried out the timer on my camera to get a group shot as we all got ready to head out Sunday morning.  It’s got a two second delay, so we’re missing Mollie because she was setting up her camera for group shots.

Because as you can see, we both like to capture moments.

Thanks Mollie for getting me the shots.  See you Sunday for our next cousins adventure by the water.  I’ve already made sure the camera has a memory card in it and packed a spare in the bag.