Proud to be an American

4th of July is one of my favorite holidays. It just feels so.......summer! It is cookouts, and friends, and independence, and being patriotic, and feeling like one community. I love community and togetherness. Maybe this why we like to cook people dinner so often. I feel like on the 4th of July people set aside their differences and their party lines and celebrate the freedom that we do have here. What a great country we live in. I am so thankful. I was telling my friends I feel particularly more patriotic this year. While at the beach we saw a big Army fighter helicopter fly along the coast and a American troop sat there in the open door waving at all us beach goers. It was very moving, here I am enjoying the beaches of the Atlantic coast while people are fighting for us, it is enough to make you cry and sing the national anthem. To commemorate these feelings I made an American Flag cheesecake, come on who does not love that!

We did enjoy a cookout of our own this 4th of July with friends. BellaRose and I had gone to pick blueberries with Heidi and her kids, and they just happened to make the perfect stars to this cheesecake and they just happen to be one of BellaRose's favorite fruits! While picking she would just pull them off the tree and eat them. I am pretty sure BellaRose felt patriotic as well with her red, white, and blue stars dress (sorry about the b/w picture).
Look at her being such a big girl walking with her daddy. She does take a couple of steps on her own, but not very often. She likes the security of knowing there is a hand to hold nearby, but really who doesn't!

On Sunday we headed back up to the High Country (notice a trend here) with Brother Ben in tow and went to one of my favorite spots Gragg Prong. I love this place because the trail goes along the river, and there are so many places to swim. Of course we get to this spot pictured and get BellaRose in her swimsuit and the boys jump in the water once and the rains started falling. It was torrential downpour! BellaRose did amazing and did not even care. I guess it is all water to her. The rain lasted about 20 minutes and then it cleared and the sun came out and we got all excited again, set everything out to dry and then another huge cloud came, so this time we decided to back it up. We still had a blast though. We got to see our good friend Steve in Banner Elk and meet his special lady friend, got BellaRose outside playing in creeks and streams. This is what it is all about!

A little blog housekeeping~ I changed around the links to the left. You can now tell when people update their blogs which may help us all save time, as I tend to go through the list everyday to see who updated. Also just to let you know, as more people are joining in on the blog world, whether they be reader or fellow blogger themselves, you can (most of the time) just click on an image to make it larger. Also I will add links from time to time and I always change the color and make the word bold when that particular word is a link to another web page. I hope this helps all you newbies out there. Thanks for sticking out another epic blog. You must really like us!