I have always wanted to check out the fireworks in Manhattan with my kids for the 4th of July. 🗽🎆 But somehow 10 years later and the time has just gotten away from me. Either I was pregnant, or had a little baby, or the weather was crappy or the weather was perfect and we had a fun plan to be with friends and watch the fireworks at the East Hills Park.

Last summer when Hailey went to sleepaway camp, I was so upset because I realized I ruined my chances forever. 😩 It was a hard pill to swallow knowing that I would never get to watch fireworks with her again as a little girl on the 4th of July. 👧🏽✖️🇺🇸🎆 Nor would I get another chance to coordinate my complete family with 4th of July wardrobes and have a photoshoot. 👕👚🇺🇸✖️ Nor would I have 1 pic of all 4 kids together on the 4th of July as kids. 👭👬🇺🇸📷✖️ I was so sad. So THIS year when we decided she was not going to sleepaway camp I knew it was my chance to do it all and I had no time to waste. 🙋🏽

First thing I did was head to Old Navy and got our family their famous flag Tshirts with the year! ✅✅✅✅✅✅Next thing I did was make sure I got all my important pictures out of the way! 📸📷👨‍👩‍👦‍👦👭.

Now the last part was the most challenging. Getting from the Hamptons all the way to Manhattan on a busy traffic travel day. 🚕🚕🚙🚓🚗🚐 I had no clue where to go in the city and how we should get there. Thanks to Odellia at Takeoff Travel she gave me some great ideas from her blog. Since I knew I had only ONE chance to do this right we decided to go big and do it right! We opted to purchase tickets for the Freedom Fest on Pier 15 at South Street Seaport! 💰🎫🎫🎫🎫🎫🎫🇺🇸🎆

When we arrived 2 things went wrong…first of all the weather started getting rough 🌬🌬🌫🌫💨and second of all I didn’t realize that the South St. Seaport blew away in hurricane Sandy!!! 😳😳😳😳😳 🌪🌪🌪.

So I was envisioning big festivals with crowds of people and performances on a packed pier with stores. All we got was crowds of people and over 3 hours to spare. That’s ok we got this! 💪🏽

We were those people that u feel bad for in a crowd and you think to yourself ooooo sucks to be them… Trying to navigate a double stroller through hundreds of tightly packed people and carrying tons of bags and four kids in tow. We gave up trying to explore the Seaport and headed to the Watermark Restaurant to find our table!

We took turns waiting on the bbq food line to collect our dinners.🍔🌭🌯 After Skyler spit out the hotdog and hamburger 🍔🌭✖️ and we discovered that the bar had no milk I found an old smashed pack of crumb cake muffins on the bottom of my bag and poured a Shirley temple into his bottle and called that dinner! 🍼🍹🍪✔️

Our potential views seemed really good. There were ticketed seats in front of our tables and then the general admission section in the very front and then it was the water…

For about a half hour all was good and we were enjoying the great music 🎧from the DJ…

until…it started to mist…and then mist turned to drizzle. 💦 We headed for cover under the overhang, as did 200 people, which was really fun again when you’re trying to maneuver a double stroller and have a wiggly crying baby and a cranky toddler. The best part was trying to keep said crying baby contained under your umbrella in your 2×2 foot area in the crowd as he flails and carries on with a tantrum and you try not to poke anyone’s eyes out with your moving umbrella. Also fun was trying to keep the mids (Dylan and Shane) separated but in the same 2×2 area because of the nonstop fighting. Lots of gritted teeth and threats were flying 😤😡👺which turned to pleasant smiles ☺️when onlookers looked out way…

I considered waving the white flag, until I remembered that dancing in the rain was one of the items on my Unbummer summer list. 💃🏽💃🏽🌨☔️So I made the kids give me any extra clothes they didn’t need and I stuffed them into my bag to save as dry when we needed to change into later and I changed my mindset into adventure mode! This plan would work except I felt bad forcing Skyler to play a long with a game he didn’t understand. But we did our rain dance and it worked! 💃🏽🌧✖️

The rain started to taper off around 9pm and we decided to test the open skies and go back to our table. We waited anxiously wondering and anticipating what the first firework would look like, and how close it would be.

And then BOOM. 🎆 It flew up right in front of our faces straight ahead on the Macy’s barge. Incredible. 🎆🎇🎆🎇🎆🎇

For a half hour the skies got pummeled with all different kinds of fireworks and colors. 🎆🎇Huge big loud ones that made the crowd go wild!😁😁😁 Our new game of 2016 after seeing fireworks for 3 days in a row was shouting out the names of the fireworks based on how they looked. We saw weeping willows, and glitterattis, bow ties and smiley faces, show offs, raining stars, two-ffers, peekaboos, rockets, creepy crawlers wild guys and USAs.

They were dazzling and many times I had to tell the girls stop videoing them and LIVE IT! 📱✖️The boys also loved it and were mesmerized!

We hugged all night and tried not to talk about not being together next year. ❤️💛💚💙💜And then before you knew it, it was finale time! It was an incredible experience and such a bucketlist item! We were so thankful and lucky that God came through and held off the rain for the half hour of performance time and as we made our way off the pier it started to drizzle again…next time we will check out the 34th street launching section, I believe that’s the one you see on tv, 📺✔️ but the lower Manhattan launch was unreal and I’m so very happy that we checked it off! 🇺🇸🎇🎆🎇🎆🎆🎇🎆🎊🎉👨‍👩‍👦‍👦👭