July 4th weekend

I had a nice 4 day weekend because Dean had off Thursday..since my office was closed Friday, I decided to take off and we decided we could take Ryan for his 2 year pictures. This time we decided to take advantage of JC Penney's coupons and try their Portrait Studio. While, Portrait Innovations is wonderful and we will still get our family Christmas pictures taken there, based on this experience JC Penney will more than likely be our "every other celebration portrait studio", like Easter & birthdays. We were very pleased with the photographer's patience, demeanor and she seemed to know all the right noises & actions to perform to get Ryan to smile (something our last photographer at PI wasn't good at). As always it was very hard to choose from all the poses but we (well, mostly me since Dean was trying to keep an eye on Ryan running around)settled on several including these:
















I spent the next day with one of my friends and we went down the harbor where they were having the annual Parade of Sail, a boat parade. Ryan enjoyed all the different boats and that seemed to be his favorite word for the weekend as he kept saying boat boat, everywhere we went.

We knew Ryan would probably not be able to stay up for our local fireworks, since they didn't start until 9:30 or 10 & Ryan is almost always ready for bed by 7:45 so for the 4th of July we just decided to have family over and have a cookout. We had a nice day with my mom & the weather was wonderful so we let Ryan have some fun in his pool.