The Parade 2012

The 4th of July celebration began with the city parade the night of the 3rd.  If you want a good spot, ideally in the shade, you must put out your chairs several days ahead of the actual parade.  Pretty much every inch of sidewalk along the entire parade route is claimed.  Thankfully our chairs were unmolested, but I cannot say the same for all of my friends.  A few were dealt the ultimate blow by their community-- their chairs were tossed off into the bushes and their shady spot was stolen from them!!!! That is low.
Just so you know, we did let those boys sitting behind us move up in front so they could gets lots of candy too.  We're considerate parade goers.

Of course the chief joy of the parade is the great candy grab.  My sister's family joined us for the parade.  Oh, did I mention on the blog that they have moved back to Utah?!!!  Yes, they did and we were so happy to do the parade together.  We also met up with some good homeschool friends, so all the kids had friends to compete for candy with:)

 Clark and Taylor enjoyed stealing candy from the babies.

Just kidding.

George and cousin Emi both turn 2 this month and they were happy to sit in their strollers and munch down on otter pops.  I absolutely love otter pops so I did a really smart thing this year.  I packed a cooler full of an entire box of frozen otter pops (100) and I told the kids they could have as many as they could stand to eat.  It was glorious.  We even shared our otter pops-- how selfless of us.

Does it get much better than sitting in the shade of your city's parade, with your family and friends, with an endless supply of otter pops?  

Well, I suppose I can imagine scenarios I might enjoy more, but it was really great.

YES!!!!!!

This piece of Double Bubble got thrown straight to me!!!!

What luck!

Then Abe had his moment-- he got a root beer barrel!

Clark was 12 in this picture.  As of today he is 13.  YIKES-- I have a teenager!!!!!  

Cannon had the saddest moment of the parade.  He had been sick for several days leading up to the parade and was feeling better but still very low on energy.  So he sat with me for a lot of the parade.  Some of the people in the parade really get into chucking the candy into the crowds.  Poor Cannon got pelted in the eye with a piece of candy.  He is okay, but can you imagine how tragic it would be if he was permanently blinded by a piece of parade candy?  Gratefully he dodged that bullet..........this year anyway.