October 4 Part III--A very fun festival

Tuesday Evening:  I was super tired already from the day, but Erin invited me to her preschool festival and Dylan and Kelly seemed to welcome me as well--how could I say no? I'm so glad I didn't say no! It was so much fun to be there. Here are a few pictures:

The kiddos remembered this HUGE double-slide bouncy thing from last year. Erin met some of her girlfriends from her class (Erin is super social and has several "best" friends at school) ... they spent a LOT of time sliding and jumping and cracking each other up. [I "ran" into Erin's teacher and she laughingly told me that they refer to Erin as the "Class Mayor" because she is a delegator and planner and would like to "run" just everything in class]

For awhile, I just hung out with Erin and went to the activities she desired to do. The festival was held outside in the parking lot--and it is a big parking lot. With me being at the festival, it freed up Dylan and Kelly to just keep track of two children instead of three--Brendan is 10.5 now and so he just ran around and did the things he wanted to do with not much need of any supervision. We waited in quite a long line to see the balloon-man and have him make Erin a purple dog.

Our next stop was the line to ride the little horses ... but our time went quickly because everywhere we were waiting in line, Erin made friends with whoever was standing beside us--even if she had never met the people before and even if the child was not in her class--no matter--she just interacted and did a good job making acquaintances.

Erin--you are a little doll--and I love your sweet heart so much.

After she had her pony ride on "Magic", we stopped by to visit the other animals: a young calf, two rather sizable ducks, a little donkey, and a cute llama.

Oh! And this bunny ...

About this time, Dylan and I switched kiddos. I took Cal and he took Erin.

I was surprised when Cal very vehemently wanted to try out the jumping slide ... but he is a real tough little kid, so I let him climb thinking that he would go down the first smaller slide ... but NO ... he climbed to the very top of the highest slide ... and there he sat. He would NOT come down. I couldn't coax him for anything. All of the other little kids kept encouraging him to try it. I stood at the bottom and told him I would catch him ... but nothing convinced him. 

Well ... the end of the story is that I had to climb up the blow-up slide (that was definitely NOT made for grannies to climb) and retrieve our little man and bring him back down the ladder in the middle of at least 50 preschoolers who were scrambling to get to the top of the ladder and SLIDE. Their faces were like: "What on earth is a GRANDMA doing up here?" My question exactly.

Unfortunately, Dylan witnessed me scampering up the ladder to rescue Cal and when we got to the bottom, Cal was strapped into his stroller. Hence his expression (below).

NOTE TO SELF:  No matter how much this little child "demands" something, think it through and do not give in if it is something involving ... danger. Cal does have an "odd" blood disorder that is troublesome because if he gets scraped or falls and bleeds ... the bleeding is very difficult to stop. SO ... caution is the word!!