We're Here

We actually arrived in Hometown, California on Thursday, but we've been a little busy since we arrived, so I'm only now getting around to posting.

Yesterday was the annual Flower Festival. Did you know Hometown used to be the flower seed capitol of the world? Little known fact. Things have gone downhill in the flower seed business in recent years, but we still celebrate with a parade and carnival every June.

The parade. It used to be chock full of floats adorned with flowers and seeds, each one not quite reaching Rose Parade status, but impressive nonetheless. Now, we're lucky to get 5 or 6 floats, and they are flower-adjacent. Still, my kids and the cousins had a great time sitting in the gutter on the main drag and eating donuts and getting spoiled by the Grandmas.

After the parade, it was off to the park for festival food and carnival rides. Luckily, those two did NOT lead to unfortunate results. Aside from my mom not being able to get her fork to break the surface of her funnel cake, the food was awesome. Mmmmm, Lumpia (if you've never had this Filipino spring roll type item, you're not living). And it's pronounced "Loom-pee-ya".

And speaking of pronunciations, Hometown's name ends in "Poke", not "Pock". Please get it right, out of towners.

After fried food lunch, the kids got unlimited wristbands for the carnival rides, and then the machinations began. See, my kids are giant. Sister-in-law's kids are more on the normal/petite side. Boodle is 8 years old and is nearing 60 inches. Cousin A is 3, and is not yet 42 inches. This disparity caused much turmoil about who would ride what and with whom.

Also, the carnies conspired to make many a child and parent cry by instituting a minimum height rule. They had to be at least 36 inches to ride alone. This forced SIL to have to pay to ride on things like the Merry Go Round and the snail's pace train ride. After shelling out $50 for unlimited rides for the kids, there was no way in hell we were paying more for tickets. Luckily, SIL is BADASS and stormed over to the ticket booth and raised enough hell to get two VIP tickets for the rides. It pays to have a badass in the family.

On the other end of the spectrum, we had Boodle who was too tall for a lot of rides, so she opted for the ferris wheel. She bravely chose to go on it alone, and I stood off to the side watching her stand resolutely on the steps, not really wanting to ride alone, but pissed that she couldn't go on smaller rides and dammit she was going to ride SOMETHING. At the last minute, the who would EVER say the following word about a carnival worker sweet carny put her with two other girls in line in front of her. I almost cried. She had such a look of joy/relief on her face, and SIL and I watched her grinning and chatting with the other two girls as they went round and round.

That was awesome.

After that, things wound down. Kids wilted. Grandmas sagged. Parents collapsed.

Oh, and I bought a bracelet made from spoon handles. But that's a story for another day.