Christmas Parade

Our plans shifted a couple times during the day, but, in the end, Josiah did not want to go to the parade at all and Anna was crying because she wanted to go so badly. I took Aliza, Anna and Isaiah to the Christmas Parade and Jeremy stayed home with Josiah.

This is not something I was particularly excited about doing as a solo parent. I went for it anyway hoping the good memories would outweigh the bad! They did!

We didn't arrive very early so we parked and walked very quickly past all of the lined up floats to sit at the beginning of the parade route. I don't know how many blocks it was, but it was quite a walk.

The temperature was pretty comfortable for the first hour. It got a bit windy towards the end and then it was chilly.

We had the best "parade neighbor" as the kids called her. She encouraged them to step forward to be seen for candy. (She liked getting candy too!) There was SO much candy! It was fun to see a couple people that we knew including a couple friends of the girls and Uncle Jeff with his school's band.

By the end my pockets were full and both of Isaiah's hands were full of just HIS candy. He loved it. People were walking beside the floats handing out candy. I found out later the city has an ordinance against throwing candy so people figured out that they could still pass out candy by hand.

Then we had to walk allll the way back to the car! Isaiah was such a trooper. He was cold, but kept right on walking. And just when I was telling him how proud I was of him, he tripped and fell flat on his stomach. His hand had a little cut that was bleeding which I know hurt because his hands were freezing. There were tears and I carried him the rest of the way.

That was quickly forgotten when we got to Grandma and Grandad's house to warm up. And when I emptied my pockets and showed him how much candy he got. Each of them took a candy cane over to Great Grandad and then we headed home.