Memorial Day Parade

Today we went to the Memorial Day parade that our little suburb puts on. It is a little parade but it's only a (giant) block away from our house and it's kind of fun to go to.

It was Frances' first parade and she seemed to like it a lot. She nicely sat on my lap and watched. We think that she got a little bit of sensory overload. After a bit of a break in the parade, given time to let some of it sink in, she seemed quite happy. A couple times she stood up (still on my lap) and jumped with excitement.

On another note, there were these annoying kids near us. I will usually dismiss a lot of bad behavior due to the excitement of the parade. For instance, we were sitting next to them near the curb. They had their space, we had ours. As the parade progressed, they started crowding us. It got to the point that they were actually standing in the street, directly in front of us. That was pretty irritating, especially since I was holding a baby, who I thought might want to see some of the parade. So I moved. The kids didn't seem to even notice.

That was one thing, I can easily chalk that up to excitement. So even though it was irritating, I could understand.

What I cannot understand is that when they would get a peice of candy that they didn't want, they would drop it into the street. What kind of spoiled brats throw away candy in the street? When I was a kid and I got parade candy, I ate it. It didn't matter if it was a tootsie roll, I ate it because it was candy.

Then of course, they threw their wrappers on the ground. I very nearly said something but instead I bottled it up so I could spew it onto my blog.

I talked about those kids with Arial on the walk home and she said that it probably wasn't their fault. She pointed out that their parents (or guardians) weren't any more considerate of others. They had parked their chairs in the middle of the sidewalk at the corner. So to go by them either direction you had to go into the grass. They didn't seem to mind that we had to push our stroller through the grass. A minor inconvenience but indicative of a parent (or guardian) who doesn't care if their kids litter.

mwz