What happens when you give rednecks explosives

This is really the first year that all five of Tater's and my kids are old enough to do fireworks pretty much on their own, so we grownups just sat back the other night and swatted mosquitos and watched the barn swallows and bats swoosh around over their heads, maybe secretly hoping someone would get divebombed, but that's only a maybe and you can't prove I was thinking that. Tater and her kids weren't going to be here on the 4th, so the evening of the 3rd they came out to blow things up here on our lush 40 acre estate. Sam had bought some army men at Dollar Tree for the express purpose of blowing them up and the boys immediately set up the "war" as soon as the tots arrived.

We intentionally got the firecrackers with slow fuses because Kady is still pretty skittish when it comes to firecrackers and the guy at the stand said they could also be exploded underwater. *Insert evil laugh here* It didn't take long to completely obliterate the cats' water bucket.

After watching them shoot bottle rockets and jumping jacks and smoke bombs and tanks and chickens and various other small-scale explosives, Tater wistfully said, "Man, wouldn't it be cool if we could blow up something else? Like something really messy? Like a stick of butter!" Now, I wasn't too keen on sacrificing a stick of butter for the sake of a little redneck entertaiment, but the butter was quickly forsaken when Paul said, "Abby, go inside and get one of those little cups of Jello."

As you can tell from the awful cackling coming from Tater and myself, we were highly amused.

And then, because the Jello was so hilarious, we decided to blow up some pudding.

It was actually a bit of a letdown.

Hope y'all had a happy 4th!