Evil fireworks of doom

On the 4th of July we followed our normal tradition of having parents and grandparents over for dinner and fireworks!

We wanted to make sure Keegan could enjoy the fireworks so, we put him to bed at his normal 7pm and then went and woke him up at 9:30pm when we started doing fireworks outside.

Now try to put yourselves in Keegan's tiny little shoes. Here he is snuggled up with his blankie sound asleep. When mommy comes up and plucks him out of the crib. She starts babbling about fireworks and how cool Keegan thinks they will be. By the time we get downstairs and out to the backyard Keegan is still blearily clutching his blankie and sucking on his nook. Then we go outside and "Bam, Bam, sizzle, whistle" (along with bright lights of course).

As I look back on it, that may not have been the best way to do things. Needless to say Keegan was very upset with the fireworks. He starting shaking and crying and clinging to mommy. Then when that didn't stop those nasty fireworks he asked to be put down and then drug himself (Blankie and all) over to my mom's lap and cringed there for a while. Well, that didn't stop them either so it was off to grandpa's lap, etc. etc and then back to mom.

We tried to make them exciting by clapping and talking about how neat they were. Well finally Keegan relented and cracked a little smile. I set him down and then (unbeknownst to me the next fountain was a "Screaming Tiger") "loud whistle". The noise scared the poo poo out of Keegan and he crawled right up the chair into grandpa's lap.

We finally started asking Keegan to go pick out the fireworks. This was the beginning of his firework acceptance. He would go over and dig a fountain out of the box of fireworks. He would toddle it over to Lyle. Then he would come back and sit in my lap while Lyle fired it up. This went on for a while. Then Keegan got too enthusiastic about his duties. He wanted to bring all of the fireworks to Lyle, "Right Now". It didn't really matter and it kept Keegan busy and happy.

For the noisier ones my dad would hold Keegan and yell "bam, bam, bam, bam". For some reason Keegan thought my dad yelling "bam, bam" was the funniest thing in the world and he laughed very hard at it.

After that it was time to go out on the pontoon and take that out to the middle of the lake so that we could watch the Blaine city fireworks. Keegan thought this was super cool. He loved watching the lights from the boat reflect in the lake. The Blaine fireworks were pretty far away and much quieter; Keegan enjoyed them a lot. He kept running between people and yelling "whas that" (his version of what's that) for every firework that was shot up. He also loved shouting "red ball" for all of the big red circular fireworks. He really had a great time which was a relief given how the evening of fireworks had started.

Hopefully he will "remember" some of this next year so that we don't have to start over in dealing with this fear of big loud fireworks :-)