Best! Night! Ever!

The girls stayed up the latest they have every stayed up in their lives last night (later than Disney World! Later than Christmas Eve!), and it was a total party.

We had tickets to the Whitecaps game. Even though the skies had been cloudy and gray for what felt like days and days beforehand, the sun started peeking out right as we got to the stadium, and by the time we'd gotten our food and settled in, it was full-on sunny.

Let's talk about the food, shall we? It was stuff I only really eat at ballparks and fairs, so even though part of my brain knows it's disgusting and full of horribleness, part of my brain just goes to Awesome Childhood Memories, and that's what was happening last night while we ate hot dogs and cotton candy and a giant sleeve of popcorn and french fries and pop. The girls spied the cotton candy as we were still eating our "dinner" and they began clamoring for it because we had said we could get some, and Jason did that thing where you flag down the guy who walks around with a tower of cotton candy bags. I watched their faces as cotton candy guy approached and I remembered how it was when your dad could summon magic like that and make your very dream come true with a few dollars at the ballpark. I remember hardly daring to ask for those things, sometimes, and how lucky I felt when my parents said yes.

I've resolved to say yes to more things this year, but don't think the fact that Jemma skipped her nap yesterday and we were in it for the long haul for the fireworks last night wasn't giving me a teeeeny bit of anxiety. The actual baseball game was over a little before 9:00, which I thought was pretty great until the announcer came on to say that we'd have an hour wait until it was dark enough to start the fireworks. I admit, part of me wanted to bail then. Jemma had done well at first, but had then spent from about 8:30 to 9:00 actively trying to find a way to fall asleep stretched out on the bleacher beside me, and my sleep nazi tendencies were prowling just beneath the surface. Jason prevailed though, and I'm glad he did, because we filled the hour with running the bases and watching some hilarious on-field dance competitions until finally, finally it was time to settle back in the darkness and hold little girls on our laps while fireworks exploded above our heads. It was quintessential summer, and I'm so glad we didn't miss it.

Annie and I held hands and skipped to the car. We drove home with the windows down, watching for fireflies on the lawns of houses where people were mostly already asleep. At 10:45, we tucked in two little girls full of cotton candy and popcorn and a little summer magic. And we slept in a little this morning, too.