4th of July

Every year during the weekend of the 4th of July, Iowa City hosts their annual Jazz Festival. Each year we have gone out to the festival to get out of the house, eat food from the local vendors (mmm...Indian appetizers and funnel cakes!), and listen to the live jazz music. The city blocks off a few of the streets downtown, which is the norm for these sorts of events, and sets up several stages for local jazz talent to play. There is usually one for high school bands and then another for more established local performers. In front of the Capital building there is a larger stage set up for the more notable names in jazz music that the jazz aficionados actually recognize! Tons of people come to set up lawn chairs, picnic, read, and do whatever while they listen to live music. It's pretty groovy. Here we are in front of the Capital with the main stage and the crowd behind us. It actually rained on and off all day so people just popped open their umbrellas when they needed to and then put them back down again! Not as many people as past years, but the faithful were still there.

Jonah will hate me one day for doing this to him. After reindeer antlers for Christmas and bunny ears for Easter, I felt like I had to do it though.

Jonah's buddy Trevin (and my buddy Shonelle) came out to the festivities with us. These two boys were all over the place...and rarely in the same direction.

We spent a little time practicing our walking since we had so much wide open space. Jonah is still far more comfortable with his bear crawl though, so don't be looking for solo walking pictures any time soon! (Jonah's face is awesome in this one.)

The city puts on a fireworks show over the Capital building after the last concert. We saw it a few years ago and it was pretty neat. Unfortunately, we knew that Jonah would never make it to the 945 p.m. start time without a melt down so we decided to skip it. Maybe next year??