So, this past week was a holiday (duh), and I wanted my kids to enjoy it, so I tried really hard to make it an enjoyable day. I want them to enjoy the holidays, because then later I can teach them as to WHY we enjoy them, why they're so good. So... Provo does a big festival for the 4th of July, so I decided to take them to some of the events. The events we had planned for the day were the Balloon Festival and the Parade, and then hopefully go somewhere to watch the Stadium of Fire fireworks. In the past, Jessica hasn't liked fireworks, but we still wanted to give Jacob a chance to enjoy them. By way of explanation, the Balloon festival is a 3-day event that Provo puts on everey year, where you can go watch them set up, inflate, and send off a whole bunch of hot-air balloons. I thought Jessica at least would LOVE it. And there was a group also doing a fundraiser pancake breakfast.
So, we got the kids up really early (5:30am) to get to the balloon festival at 6am. (Which is when I thought it started, though apparently it didn't start until 6:30. But the breakfast started at 6) Nathaniel had the day off, so he came with us and we drove down there. We got there, got everyone out and ready to walk over there, and found out that it had been cancelled due to lighting having been seen earlier in the morning. But there was still the breakfast, and I didn't really want to try to drive home, eat, and then come back (and try to find a parking spot) for the parade. So we ate our pancake breakfast, which everyone enjoyed, and then walked over to the parade to wait for about an hour (or 2) for the parade to start. It was cloudy most of the morning, which was awesome for the parade. However, waiting for 2 hours with kids is a long time.
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| Fire hats during the pre-parade. |
Luckily, about an hour in, there was a half-hour "pre-parade". That helped a lot.
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| So very tired. Sleeping with Papa. |
What else helped was that Jacob was super tired. So he slept for a good part of it. Except that we has some VERY loud...excited... (annoying) people behind us screaming the whole time. Jacob slept through the fire engine sirens (amazingly enough) but not their screaming.
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| Jessica with a real smile! |
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| Sleeping with Mama. |
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Also unfortunately, we ended up in a spot right between the various starting points of the parade. So we saw the floats and the marching bands, and other things like that, but we missed all the cars and military people. And, sadly, the sun came out right as the parade was starting. And it got SUPER hot. Poor Jacob started getting red spots under the collar of his shirt, so Nathaniel took him back to the car while I stayed with Jessica. I don't know about Nathaniel, but it took Jessica, Jacob, and I about 3 days to recover from it. So no fireworks that night for us. I'm starting to think that I didn't have the most brilliant idea that day. I'm thinking next time we should split the balloon festival and the parade up onto different days.
