Fancy Nancy: Splendiferous Christmas Day 4

I wrote the other day about spending time with my sister Jenni and her family the first weekend in December. After we shared dinner at Zaidy’s we went downtown to see the light parade and the lighting up of the capital building. This is one of those Christmas things that I suspect always sounds better than it really is.

Do you know what a light parade is? It is a parade that has to happen after dark. Parades require certain streets be closed off so that cars don’t run over marching bands or crash into parade floats. So unless you are lucky enough that you live on the parade route you are going to have to park, and walk to where the parade is.
I hadn’t planned on walking. Sometimes a shoe that looks good with an outfit and is comfortable for a limited amount of walking, and standing and driving is not the shoe you want to wear for an outrageous amount of walking. And there was an outrageous amount of walking. Honestly we may as well have been in the parade.

However, in spite of my internal monologue that was silently cursing the holiday entities that were surely laughing at me, I noticed that my boys didn’t seem to mind the walking. Paul carried Keenan more than half the time. He had him thrown over his shoulder and Keenen was laughing. “Uncle, uncle, everyone is looking at us and they think Paul must be my Dad! How silly is that Uncle!” I don’t know how true that is, but it was fun to see.

Every time we got to a street we had to cross Jenni would say everyone find a partner, hold someone’s hand, and Naomi would run over to Matthew and grab his hand. I wish I had been able to get a picture of her looking at Matthew, she honestly adores him and I love that!

Finally we did manage to catch up with the tail end of the parade. Of course there were tons of people in front of us with a better view of what was going on. Kendrick picked up Naomi and put her on his shoulders. Keenan looked up and me, sized me up, then turned to Paul and asked Paul to show him the parade. My Paul is a strong tall boy and he just picked up his cousin and set him on his shoulders so he could watch the parade. Keenan had the best seat in the house and Paul let him sit up there for a good 30 minutes or so until the parade was over. How sweet was that?

After the parade was over there was still a ton of walking left to do, and both my boys got tons of cousin love all the way.