Bear Paw-ing It Up

This past week (From Wednesday until yesterday) was the Annual Bear Paw Festival, here in Eagle River. With our boys really being too young for most of the activities that went on all week, we didn't do much with it. We did, however, venture out twice on Saturday.

We started our celebration of the festival by going down to the parade. It was a pretty cool parade and the boys had a great time. This was their first parade and they did great just sitting on the curb, waving and clapping and pointing out all the cool things they saw. Added bonus: every so often people would walk through the parade handing out candy to kids who had bags or baskets or whatever to put them in. Sweet! I took about 150 pictures of the parade, but I won't post them all here. I'll just pick a few to highlight, with promises of them being on flickr soon enough.

Zeke was super excited to see the train go through the parade...

almost as excited as he was about the "bears and bubbles" float.

this is the beginning of the parade...the DARE car

and the military band.

and here we are super excited for it all to begin.

After the parade was over, we went home, had lunch, and put the boys down for naps. After their naps though, we headed out again. This time, we went to the carnival. This was a rather large set up with an area with rides and games and some food, plus another area of lines of tents with vendors and more food. There was also a little stage for the dance groups and gymnastic groups to perform (and I guess advertise) on. There was also music playing by the grassy area where people were just hanging out. Again, with the boys being a little young for most of it, and the crowd being a little too much for Josh, we got some ride tickets and took the boys on their first ever carousel ride (in honor of Josh's mom). Zeke freaked out at first when I tried to put him on the horse, but when the ride was over, he freaked out because I had to take him off of the horse. Zeke then wanted to try the little rollercoaster, but we didn't have enough tickets leftover from the carousel ride (the guy running the ride let the kids - or maybe us - ride for free, which was sweet) for him and me to go on it, so Josh took the kids to the park that was right there while I got us some funnel cake (in honor of my mom) and some lemonade. Mmm.

they even had a fire truck set up with the hose on for people to play in

and yes, it was hot enough to do that.

here is Josh and Deacon on the carousel, waiting for it to begin
(Deacon clearly isn't in any rush as he happily has a cracker in hand)

here is Zeke trying to play it cool, but he was very much enjoying himself


here they are at the park waiting for me to come back,
clearly, I was missed...or not

ahhh...nothing like cool lemonade on a hot summer day
after good times at the carnival

It was a lot of fun and I am now looking forward to the Alaska State Fair at the very end of next month. I can just see Josh rolling his eyes and starting to twitch nervously. Otherwise, we've just been hanging out, enjoying the incredible weather we've been blessed with lately. I did, however, finally get last month's pictures up on flickr. You can check them out by clicking here, if you are so inclined. And that is all for now.