These Are the People in Your Neighborhood

Yippee for neighborhood carnivals! Friends A and K organize one every year, and this year E was old enough to really enjoy it. Baby m didn't know what was going on...mostly he sat patiently in the stroller and watched his big sister have fun.

When we first got there they were still setting up, so we headed over to the conveniently located playground...E waited for her turn on the swing, then slid down the slide a few times before we were joined by A and Baby w. Then J and Ke showed up, and E went running to Ke, shouting, skipping and jumping just like she greeted me last weekend at the airport. We probably could have just stayed at the swings the whole time, but I bought tickets...so we had to go use them!

At the duck pond, E picked a winning duck. So she went to the prize box and selected a little container of bubbles shaped like a crayon. Then we got our "meal deal" to share...for 6 tickets ($1.50) you got a hot dog, beans, watermelon, pretzels, a cookie, and a drink. Can you say, "Bargain?" E ate a few bites of each and seemed to really like the watermelon...except for the part that had ketchup on it. Oops. The hot dog got too close. She does NOT like her food to touch. Two more tickets got us a bag of popcorn, and I spent the next ten minutes saying, "Chew it, honey. Just one piece at a time." Girlie loves her popcorn, and she eats it ravenously. As we were enjoying our treats, we could see a bouncy house obstacle course being inflated in the distance. E watched intently as it went up, finally announcing "Look, guys! It's a rainbow!"

"Can we go see the rainbow, Mommy?" "Well, honey, that's really for bigger kids." She was so polite, so cute, so insistant as she looked in my eyes and said, "Please." I told her I would ask someone, because I was SURE that she was too little to go on it. Turns out, there is no such thing as too little as long as Mommy goes along for the ride. So we handed over our two tickets, took off our shoes, and jumped in to race against a four year old boy. I have to say, once I squeezed my butt through the entrance, it was really pretty fun. There is absolutely NO WAY to get hurt unless you bump into the other racer (or your Mother)...but E could not scale the Very Big Wall at the end that led to the slide. The four year old waited for us (I guess he didn't want to beat us too badly) and a worker helped pull E up to the top. We held hands and on the count of three we slid down together. Yippee! Baby m was watching with his friends from the sidelines...next year we'll all be racing!

Oh, maybe next year I'll be twisting balloon hats for three tickets each. You never know!