Pre-Independance Day Celebration

Of course we did more boating today, because that's what you do when you live on the lake.  We got up this morning and went to Maria's House of Pancakes for a pancake breakfast and then headed out on the pontoon boat to catch some sun and swim.  Austin's parents and Aunt Shelby were coming over later, so we enjoyed the day until they arrived.

Little Miss Hadley likes to drive the boat...all by herself.  She gets mad if you touch the steering wheel.  I think she just likes things with engines in general.  She's infatuated with the corvette, and loves to pretend drive the G6.  In fact, the other day I put her in the car with the windows down so I could run inside for a minute, and she yelled at me as I walked away and said, with her hand out, "keys?"  Nice try peanut!

This is the sign to our lake as you head out to the other connecting lakes.  Each lake has it's own sign which is pretty nice.

Our little dare devil.  I don't like it when she does this, but I took a picture of her hanging over the boat anyways because she looked so stinkin' cute!

The Dog & Brat Boat, held by the Barbee Lakes Property Owner's Association, was in the channel leading to Big Barbee lake this year.  Proceeds go toward the lake invasive weed treatments.  We didn't stop to buy any dogs or brats, however we do plan to donate to the association to show our support. 

Me and my little love bug enjoying the boat.

Uncle Zeb taught Hadley how to do the monkey face.  Now anytime you say monkey, this is what she does.  I love her little monkey face!

More Dog and Brat Boat pictures as we headed back through the channel and under the bridge to go swimming.  It looks like they had a steady stream of customers!

The Barbee Landing is the only dockside restaurant on our chain of lakes.  The appearance is a little questionable, but the food tastes good.  We wish we had a nicer restaurant that we could boat to for dinner, like The Anchor Room on Wawasee.  Oh well!

The leftover lifejackets from our adventures in the perfect storm last night.

Ahh...finally swimming!  We took the boat over to Irish to anchor down and swim.  Irish seems to be our go to lake for swimming lately.  After I took these few pictures, I got a raft and floated peacefully in the water.  It was glorious!

After swimming for a little bit, we all got hungry so we headed back to the house to get some lunch.  When we got there, we had company sitting in the chairs in the yard: Kenny, Aaron and Angie.  We felt bad when they said that they had been there for about an hour waiting on us.  Whoops!  Austin fired up the grill and we got the cornhole boards out to play a few games.  Shortly after, Austin's parents arrived with Aunt Shelby and we all hung out for the remainder of the evening.

There were fireworks again tonight.  We could see them from about four different locations from our yard.  They were the giant ones, yet again, that lit up the sky.  There is definitely no need to leave the house on and around the 4th of July because we get tons of firework shows from our backyard!