Happy Fourth! Sit back, relax poolside, and whistle along to this happy little Spotify playlist. I guarantee you’ll be wearing a smile and tapping your foot. Go ahead and press play.

Easy Fourth of July popsicles: blueberries, sliced strawberries and lemonade

Decorations: I was excited to pull out some patriotic clearance finds from after holiday sales last year. The star pillows were $6 from Target, where I also found super cheap bunting I used as table runners. The blue glasses are from the dollar store. And the flag was on sale at urban outfitters, but was still $25 — a splurge for this cheapskate. The red, white and blue towels are the only thing I bought this year and they are from target, $7 on clearance.

Floats: The rafts are all from Five Below, where everything is $5 or less. They have really cute floats and it’s not as big a deal when they get popped.

I bribed the kids with candy to take the next photos. The last one is my favorite! Haha!

Patriotic side note: Eric Metaxas is fascinating, sort of an academic with a sense of humor. Get an American history lesson on our country as you never knew it in this video of Greg Laurie interviewing him. I can’t stop thinking about it.

“It is the real stories of heroes like Washington and Nathan Hale and others that help us to properly feel the power of the ideas behind them. We must feel the horror of tyranny and must love the noble idea of liberty. We must love America. We cannot reduce things to the intellectual. In the end we must feel those ideas and see them embodied in heroes and stories. By deciding that every potential hero is too flawed to celebrate and venerate, or that such stories are somehow corny, we have done a grave disservice to several generations and to the country.” 

― Eric Metaxas, “If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty”