The week before James and Julia's 8th birthday, I was low on inspiration of how to celebrate. I googled "things to do in Danville on September 4th." Come to find out, the Fourth of July parade had been rescheduled to take place on their birthday! My first thought was, "it would be so fun to go to the parade!" My next thought was, "it would be EVEN MORE FUN to to BE IN the parade!" I fired off an e-mail to the organizers to see if there was any way we could enter the parade. Not only did they grant us entry, but they PAID OUR $500 ENTRANCE FEE! I alerted the troops, Kris ordered a giant poster, the kids dusted off their bikes and we bought loads of the Halloween candy that had literally just hit the store shelves. I decided to use this opportunity to pull off my "random acts of kindness" assignment for my Discipleship class, so the night before the parade the kids helped me stick labels that said "You are loved" on each piece of candy. We arrived early the next morning and were overjoyed to find that we were situated between the Monte Vista cheerleaders and a super fun rock band. We decorated our bikes and scooters with crepe paper, blew up a helium tank's worth of balloons (inside the Sackies little sports shelter) and assumed our positions. Before we pushed off, the cheerleaders-all 40 of them- sang Happy Birthday to the twins! Julia reports being on the verge of tears because it was so special. Ben came up with an equally thoughtful and random chant for us to shout along the parade route: "James is 8! Julia's 8! That's why we all celebrate! We eat candy, we eat cake, we eat ribs and we eat steak!" Nick was so embarrassed he attempted to tackle Ben to quiet him; but the opposite happened! It spurred him on! We had the BEST time marching down the parade route and the kids most loved passing out the candy! We wrapped up the day with swimming at Mimi and Papa's! Oh my goodness was it a blessed day!
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| labeling candy! |
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| Party People! Mimi and Papa joined us on the parade route! |
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| We realized that bikes were hard along the parade route-scooters are way better- so Andy and Uncle Grant kindly pushed bikes down most of the route so the kids could hand out candy. |
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Waving to the announcers of the parade!
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| Inspired by Hagrid's birthday cake for Harry. |
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| James asked Daddy to help him build a table for Julia's lego creations. |
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| Grammy and Poppy gave them loose change as a birthday gift and they spent lots of time counting it! |
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| Julia made James a box to hold his favorite things, painted in his Griffindor House colors! |
