Hillyard Festival 2008

We have now experienced the yearly celebration of our new part of Spokane. This is the first one since we have lived in Hillyard and so we wanted to show some community awareness and support, thus we made a conscious effort to go to the parade. I am not much on big crowds, with my tendency to have panic attacks on occasion, but we took Grac-i-nator, the Livers, the Flava and Miss Oriss (aka Mooky Mooky) and headed over to Market street.

Now, there we were on Market with 10 minutes to spare...I had to get four kids ready so I wasn't the 20 minutes early like I usually like to be for this type of event....and there were huge areas along the route that were vacant of onlookers. Huzzah! I was so happy, we only had to move once to avoid the dingle-dorks who were smoking up wind of us. (This we did because Miss Oriss has fragile lungs, beings that she is so small, and the fact that I have asthma, and the stink that it causes in the air and to make me more grumpy with those goober-noodles one of them was out to HERE pregnant with a death stick burning in her hand.) After the move we were settled in for the big event. It was really the first parade Java Flave has ever been to, and he and the Grac-i-nator loved it. They wave to all the people and thanked everyone that threw candy for them. The best part for The Flave was when the dogs came through. He thought that was jsut the best thing ever.

Grac-i-nator of course thought that the Princesses were the be all, end all of the parade. She kept saying, "oh look at the pwincess, see the pwincess" (she has a bit of a lisp...absolutely adorable).

Later on in the evening we went back and Javin and Aaron went down the bouncy slide thing 4 time, of course after that he just kept wanting to go. I however didn't bring very much $ so I let him take some pictures to distract him as we walked home. As you look at the following pics try to determine which ones he took!




After we had been home for a few hours we heard a BOOM, BOOM and then a WHISTLE! The fireworks! We forgot all about the fireworks, so we quickly grabbed the children, the lawn chairs and a blanket for the Mooky and sat in our front yard and enjoyed the end of the show. Java Flave actually stayed outside and watched, that deserves another HUZZAH! This was the very first time he didn't cry during a fireworks show.
It felt like small town America within the big city (notice I said big city and not huge city....Spokane seems pretty big to me). Most of the neighborhoods have names and many of them have special celebrations. It was nice to take part! I even learned a bit while there. I stopped by the Hillyard museum booth and talked the the little old guys that ran it. I told them that MANY moons ago my Grandmother had graduated from Hillyard High and asked if they knew much about it. One of them said, "Well, I am only 80 so I wasn't around early enough to have gone there. They stopped using that when they built the new John Rogers High." Now, I thought it was cute how he said he was only 80. Then he went on to tell me where the building is. Yup, that's right the building is still here. Of course, now it is a slum lord type apartment building. I have gone on many walks past it, and always wondered what this once marvelous building was in its former life. I now know it was the place where my grandmother went to school. So all in all, it was a great day in my neighborhood!