This post is a bit belated, I know.  Anyway.

Every fourth of July there’s a children’s parade here in Denver.  The boy rides his push bike and it’s a lot of fun.  At the end of the parade is a picnic and a bouncy castle!  Last year they had free ice cream cones, too.  This year they had a 250 foot long ice cream sundae and handed people spoons to dig it out of a communal trough.  We found this sort of gross and left before the kids started clamoring for a spoon.

Of course, it can also be fraught with peril, as this video demonstrates:

After a very quick recovery, the boy was good for the parade.

Part of the fun of the parade is that it’s a community gathering, and as such you run into many friends and neighbors.  We ran into some good friends of ours who are the parents of  one of the boy’s closest friends since infancy.  At the park afterwards, they played together.

On the grid

Happy!

Bouncy Castle

Slide races

The water balloon toss was fun, too.  You can just see the boy’s toes and hand in this picture on the right-hand column about the fifth person down, bright green shirt.

And the girl just hung out on the sidelines in her pre-walking days, finding other people’s smartphones and chewing on them.

This is our second year now and I think it’s going to be a yearly tradition, at least until the kids tell us they’re too old or cool for it.