I love a parade!

Beth, Claire and Abbie all joined Girl Scouts this year. Their first official Scouting activity was.......to march in a parade and toss candy!

Here we are at the very start of the parade yesterday, where the candy-throwing enthusiasm began.



I have pictures, too, now that we have a new camera, but I haven't bothered to figure out yet how to get them on the computer. In the meantime, here's another video. It's not great, but it shows the constant refrain of the day: DON'T THROW ALL YOUR CANDY AT ONCE! The kids had a really hard time with this - it was just too much fun. At one point policemen on motorcycles rode by, and we had to bodily restrain the girls from pelting them with candy. It was a frenzy of candy throwing, and what I loved the most about it was the way the littlest girls couldn't actually reach the sidewalk, so most of their candy just ended up getting trampled in the middle of the road.




This final video is from before the parade began, while we were lining up. For reasons beyond comprehension, they placed our pack of little girls directly behind a group of ....horses. You can probably guess the challenge this presented! The second refrain of the day was: DON'T STEP IN THE HORSE POOP! The girls actually did a great job, and the only incident involved not a little girl but a very pregnant woman who was paying more attention to the candy her daughter had just dropped than to where she was walking. Ahem.



All in all, though, it was a fantastic way to spend the morning and afternoon. I love the cheesiness of small-town parades, and I loved the feeling of community we had as we walked down the road and were greeted by tons of people we knew (through school, mostly, although my favorite coffee shop gave us a shout-out as well.) And Lucy really enjoyed the way the whole troop showered her and Katie with candy when we passed them.