Three Rivers Festival

This passed weekend was the Three Rivers Festival, the festival the locals had been talking about ever since we arrived. It is the biggest festival of the year, and lasted for TEN days! They kicked the whole thing off with a Led Zepplin cover band concert (on our block) that lasted from 6pm-12am. It was so loud I wanted to shoot some one, or something... Not literally, but when I'm pregnant I get agitated easily... and for some reason saying ridiculous things makes me feel better...

Anyway, the next morning, we woke up and went out to a nice family breakfast. Then we took Jack to the parade. This was a pretty big deal. There were 176 entries, and it was scheduled to last for at least TWO HOURS. I thought that Jack might be interested in seeing the bands, the horses, and some of the cars, but he was totally into it. Way more into it than I expected. He was hooked. Every time anyone or anything would pass, he would wave and say hi. "Hi, doggy", "Hi, fire truck", "Hi, guy". He was the cutest. You can see here just how fixated he was...

After about an hour of watching, I started to ask Jack every few minutes if he was ready to go home yet. He responded "no" every time. So we ended up staying until my poor pregnant feet started swelling and it was time for Jack to take his nap.

The chicken man came over and we snapped a shot. Jack's face is totally priceless. 

On Sunday, we walked down to the river to see the sidewalk chalk contest. Some of them were really, really amazing. I thought that it was so incredible that people could make something look so realistic, with sidewalk chalk, in under a day. They are talented, I tell ya. 

Later on in the week, we walked down to the multicultural festival and toured the booths, walked the carnival, explored junk food alley (where we devoured a delicious snow cone with vanilla ice cream), and of course we watched the guys giving helicopter tours take off (which Jack LOVED). 

On the following Sunday, the festival closed by having a HUGE firework show that started at 10pm... and wouldn't ya know it, they launched the fireworks off of our neighboring building. It sounded like we were being bombed. Literally our windows and walls were shaking. I could not believe that Jack actually slept through all of the noise. Lucky us...

All in all, it was a very noisy, but very exciting week.