What Do You Do At A Popcorn Festival?

Saturday morning, after Anna and Noah spent the night, started early. The children were admonished to not get up before 8:30 so at about 7:20 someone touched my arm softer than a whisper and then her very quiet voice said, "Grandma?" "What, Honey." "We're bored. Can we read?" "Sure," I said. A few minutes later, the same touch and the same quiet voice with the same message. We're bored. Okay, you can play in the playroom. A few minutes later I got up. I did my shred and the kids weren't even that interested. It's seems they'd seen their mom do it plenty of times.

Outside it was pouring and not looking a bit like we'd go to the Popcorn Festival but a few hours later the rain stopped, the radar looked promising, and we got ready to go. I picked up my camera and the battery was suddenly so dead that the camera wouldn't turn on. I put it in the charger and no dice - and no charge either. Anybody that knows me knows that I'm NOT going to a Popcorn Festival with grandchildren without a camera. So we stopped at Batteries Plus, a business that I'm appreciating more and more. This was a good chance to assess the condition of Anna's three loose teeth among other important subjects.

Noah looked around a little and then very importantly told me that they were pretty much out of all batteries at their house and that we should probably get some. Evidently the AAA batteries were at the most critical level. Fortunately, I mean unfortunately, we had already checked out.

We stopped at Anna and Noah's house for jackets and closed toe shoes both of which were unnecessary as the weather suddenly cleared and warmed.

As soon as we got to the festival, the first order of business was lunch. The kids wanted cotton candy but we told them we'd get some on the way out.

Anna had some good ideas about where to go.

After passing a lot of booths where I would have lingered except they were just too boring for the children and would have entailed spending money, we found the air rides. The kids went through a very long caterpillar and then headed for the Wave of Fire. There were no waves and no fire but there was a really high slide.

They climbed up and I had to try to guess which side they were coming down so I could get some good action shots. After the first round, we worked out a system where they'd stand at the top and wave, making sure I saw them, before heading down.

Noah was a little uneasy during his first slide but recovered by the time he reached the bottom.

After three trips on the Wave of Fire we sought other adventures. The next one and what turned out to be their favorite, was the obstacle course where they raced through all sorts of obstacles, climbed a wall, and flew down a slide at the end.


We had three more tickets each for them and thought they could try their hands at a couple of challenging games with ridiculously cheap prizes. This was good though because there was no big disappointment the couple of times that they didn't win anything.

I'm confident Beth won't read this post and she'll never know that her children held guns and shot at small safari animals.

Here you can see Annie Oakley, aka Anna, taking aim. She got her kill on the first or second try. Her Aunt Amy would have been so proud. Noah knew his turn was coming and paid very careful attention.

Noah, you know being a little younger and all, struggled a little with the hold and with his aim.
I have to give the teenager credit for his patience because even though sometimes Noah aimed for a full minute or more, the teen didn't rush him. Sometimes, while Noah was aiming, he'd look at him and smile while I lowered the camera to rest my arms, but he never rushed him.

On his last shot, Noah hit his target. He looks satisfied but look how happy his Grandpa is!

We headed for the car with the kids asking every few seconds if we could get cotton candy and us promising that we would get some at one of the last booths before we got to our parking place. I walked with Anna and Mr. Right walked with Noah. It may look like Mr. Grandright was getting a little impatient with Noah who was too distracted by one of his cheap prizes to keep walking, but he was. Just a little.

They did fall slightly behind because incidents like this kept happening. See that little blue ball near the bottom of the picture? And see Mr. Grandright's face? It was okay though. He never got mad and he was patient and generous all afternoon.

Then we got to the last booth. You know. The one with the cotton candy. Except there was no cotton candy. The whole cotton candy section was empty. The kids still insisted that I go up to the people in the booth and ask if they were out of the cotton candy that was nowhere to be seen and it was confirmed. They were out of cotton candy. Why oh why after everything went so perfectly, did we have to break our promise to get the cotton candy? I guess it was just meant to be.

We got back to Beth's and somebody was really happy to see his siblings (although he appeared to be wondering why they weren't holding any cotton candy).

It was a fun 24+ hours. Toadmama commented yesterday that she bet Grandma slept well and she was oh so right. But I'll guarantee that last night's sleep was nothing compared to what tonight's is going to be. I am happy and completely exhausted!