Ella’s school, Garden of Hope, had the opportunity to participate in the Manitou Days parade this year. And of course, because I can’t not volunteer when the situation arises, I was quick to jump on board as parade coordinator/float designer. We used my new mom-mobile as our float and I set to work decorating it. With an idea building in my head, and the help of some eager summer school students, we were able to create what I think was one of the cutest floats in the parade. That’s saying a lot since there are at least 70 entries. Granted, I’m a little biased since it’s my creation and my favorite school…
I have to admit, creating the signs was therapeutic. It felt great to have a project to focus on. I love a good creative project. And, it was like scrapbooking – on eight feet of paper! That’s just fun! There was paint, glitter, raffia, hot glue, lots of tape runner and construction paper. Those are the ingredients for a great time in my book.
I’d given Ella the very important job of taking pencils out of their smaller boxes and put them in buckets for easier passing. It was a slow job as Ella would take one pencil from the box, read it and exclaim, “Oh! Garden of Hope!” put it in the bucket, then onto the next pencil, which she’d read, gasp at the revelation that it said Garden of Hope, put in the bucket. Repeat. For.every.single.pencil. Needless to say, she didn’t get them all placed. It was a valiant effort however, and her ability to recognize environmental print is rapidly increasing.
The evening of the parade, I’d invited anyone wanting to participate over to our house for a little BBQ prior to walking the course. It was so fun to have everyone over. I think Ella was a bit in shock when her teachers were at her house!
With grey clouds looming and a few sprinkles in the air, we completely lucked out with the sun breaking out while we were lined up and we stayed dry throughout. The temps were perfect and we set out to wave and pass out pencils to thousands of our close personal friends! We had 3,000 pencils to pass out and we weren’t even halfway through when I noticed we had maybe a quarter of our pencils left…with the call out to slow down our eager pencil passers, we made it through the parade with only a few pencils remaining! There had to be over 5,000 spectators. It was great! It took us about 2.5 hours including our line-up wait time. We saw lots of familiar faces. Loran figures we used half a gallon of fuel and he had a slight foot cramp from the brake, go, brake, go…he hasn’t had to drive in stop and go traffic like that since he started working on our side of the cities.
Ella decided right away, she wasn’t walking in the parade. No way, no how. Not a problem, she was loaded into her carseat and she was perfectly happy to watch the parade pass through the window. Lillian was a different story. Aunt Chelsey pushed her in her pink car and she was so excited to be in the parade. It could have been a parade to celebrate her for all she cared. She loved seeing everyone, waving and genuinely enjoyed every moment. I had to break her out of her car for a few minutes so she could down some Pediasure (calorie loading doesn’t pause for a parade), and she was back at it!
The children did great passing out pencils, waving and looking generally cute. We popped children in and out of the car as they needed rest where they blew bubbles to a very happy audience. It was just a blast! I even saw a lot of people taking photos of our float so hopefully they are future Garden of Hope attendees.
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