Independence Day part 2

I forgot to mention in the last post about the 4th of July that those photos only showed our "morning activities." Post naptime, here is what we did:

Ate festival foods, rode carnival rides (actually just Mr. Lo did the carnival, and he stayed pretty tame about it--jump house and large slidey thing), and the highlight...

Pony rides! Jerry loved that he got to be the one leading the pony around. Lo kept saying, "I riding a real horsie!" and it took some coaxing to get him to dismount. Also, it should be mentioned that we almost bought a tank of baby turtles from one of the vendors at this festival. Jerry and I are sort of really pet-people, and it drives us crazy to move so often we don't feel ready to buy another pet right now. But seriously, these turtles were adorable. Palm-sized swimmers that reminded Jerry of turtles he'd kept in a bowl when he was a boy. We have an official goal to get some turtles as soon as our abode stabilizes a bit. :)

Fans of Chick-Fil-A

Cow Appreciation Day was last Friday at our favorite restaurant. What's not to love about Chick-Fil-A, I ask you? We have THREE of them within a 10 min. drive of our apartment, so we got free combos for breakfast, lunch and dinner, visiting location #1, #2, and lastly #3 for each respective meal. Mr. Lo refused to wear his costume during the lunch hour (he kept insisting he wanted to be a monster for Halloween, not a cow), but the nice manager still gave him a free kid's meal. Because that's how Chick-Fil-A is.

Our costumes were pretty simple, mostly just wore white clothes and stuck on cow spots using the famous vinyl left over from Jerry's work in Ohio. Yes, we did take a roll of vinyl with us to Texas. Never know when it might come in handy...

Jerry would not naturally participate in this type of silliness, but he's such a sweet, supportive husband he just goes along with my ideas and is a good sport. We really did have a lot of fun participating! It was cool to see all the other creative costumes people came up with as well.

At one of the locations the actual Chick-Fil-A cow mascots were wandering around and Mr. Lo LOVED them! I never knew he liked that sort of thing, sort of has ignored large costumed mascots in the past. Must be developmentally his right stage now. He kept saying, "Here comes the cow!" Every time one of them came near our table. Wildly pointing and grinning with excitement. When those same cows did not appear at our visit to location #3, he just about broke down in tears, he was so disappointed and kept asking about it. So the Chick-Fil-A employee gave Lo a free plush cow to cheer him up. Have I mentioned how much I adore this restaurant chain.

Mr. Lo loved his tail. I kept laughing about how it swung back and forth when he walked.

Jerry changed out of his costume while he was in the office, and Lo could barely be convinced to keep his donned for the few minutes we showed him off at the restaurant, but I wore mine all. day. long. Including the the playground, library, Wal-Mart, etc. Really I was just too busy to change--we had a lot of errands to run. And it was a tad embarrassing, but most people either seemed to get it, "Oh, yeah, Chick-Fil-A cow appreciation day!" or else just raised their eyebrows a bit and smiled. My pregnant belly really accentuated the "cow look." :)

Independence Day 2012

We celebrated "small town style" on this past Independence Day. It was one of those serendipitous days when everything seems to go perfectly.

We attended a small community parade and party in the park. Everything was free. They had this little train that gave free rides (I think the combination of Lo and me was pushing the posted weight limit--oops).

Unlimited watermelon--we ate a couple wedges each. Did I mention this was all free??

One of our favorite floats from the parade because it had "Curious George" on it (Lo loves those books).

Mr. Lo, as he is wont to do, making friends with random strangers. His glasses were 3-D glasses, the closest thing we had to patriotic apparel for him. That, and the army pajama shirt. Yeah, I need to make a visit to Old Navy next year for a few America tees.

Jerry was proud of his parking job. I was proud of finding this little celebration, because parking was pretty smooth overall--we got nice shady spots at both the parade route and the park, without even arriving early. Ah, the benefits of a small community event vs. the huge crowded city parties.

And one more reason to love Texas: people are overwhelmingly friendly! The group near our parade spot just embraced us, handing Lo a flag to wave, gave us chairs to sit on, gave Lo a bag to store his candy (he got more than a Halloween haul) and were just generally the sweetest people. By the way, the candy was such a distraction to Mr. Lo, I don't think he noticed much of the parade floats--he was too busy darting all over with his eyes glued to the ground, picking up a never-ending supply of candy that got thrown at him.