Fiesta Float Parade and Author's Day

Fiesta Float Parade

Each year in April for nine days the city of San Antonio has a Fiesta celebration. Something about taking over the city from Mexico. Mostly it's like a mini Mardi Gras and people come from all over the country and get drunk. However, there are some really cool parades and fun historical stuff too. We don't go to any of it. We've tried a couple of times and the events are way to packed to be any fun. I think Tim and the kids got stuck a the Battle of Flowers Parade for about 7 hours last year. After that we swore off Fiesta events forever. Fortunately, the kids school makes a very big deal of it. So much so that Samuel is convinced that "Fiesta" is what happens at his school. They did a big float parade where the kids make a float with whatever theme that they choose. Then they have a big carnival for the rest of the day. Last year we did shoe box floats. That's what the flier that was sent home said to make. But when we got to the school we saw that people really go above and beyond. So this year, we did too.

Here is Samuel with his Hot Wheels Monster Jam float. We mounted it onto a little ride on toy. 

 And here is Lillie with her Fiesta Princess float mounted onto our wagon. I showed her how to make the paper flowers then she took the rest of the project into her hands and I didn't have to do a thing. I thought she did a great job on it!

 Viva Fiesta!

Author's Day

This is one of our favorite days of the school year. All week long the kids celebrate reading and do different fun activities on different days. Unfortunately this year we got the flier about it the day before Lillie and I went out of town to Ohio. We were scheduled to fly back in the day before author's day. "How on earth am I going to get these costumes together?" I thought. Fortunately things worked out. Lillie's current favorite books are the Little House on the Prairie series and she wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder. Sweet. I called up my mom and she dug out the old pioneer day costumes. This was our best, (and easiest) costume yet! 

 Here is Samuel as a Power Ranger. Now, normally I do not allow these kinds of characters for authors day. We were going to do something cooler (author's day cooler I mean) like "Put Me in the Zoo" by Robert Lopshire, or "Rude Giants" by Audrey Wood. But when it got to be 8pm the night before and we were just settling in from a week away from home I decided that the stress wasn't worth it and I let him go as what he wanted to be in the first place. He did look super awesome!

I love that my kids love books and they are both excellent readers. What with their mom, and Grandma Dianne, and Grammy, and all those Whaley sisters that love to read it's not really that big of a surprise I guess. They are each the top reader in their class and before the end of Kinder Samuel has passed almost all the reading levels that are required to graduate 1st grade. They've got great reading genes!