Hessler Street Fair

Sunday afternoon I took the kids to Hessler Street for a bit. Jon dropped us off before heading to a meeting. Right away, we ran into our friend Barbara who has been unschooling her 7 children since the early 80s. Well, we ran into a lot of people we knew (the great joy of our community), but hooked up with Barbara. We got some french fries, then went off with Barbara and her grandkids to find Harmony Park, the children's area of the festival. This collective art piece, or whatever it is, reminded me of a project for Art Day that I wanted to try. Some lady yelled at the kids for crawling under it, which made it seem sort of pointless.
Lavinia tied some string to one bit with my help in getting it nicely twisted around other bits. Then some big kids immediately undid it.
Steve pulled the boys in a sled through the grass.
And Bastian and Lavinia hid under a papasan bowl. Strange, random bits lay all about for playing with. The kids rushed back and forth between everything, unable to commit to any one activity. We had trouble keeping track of them.
After a pee break, I got the kids' faces painted. Bastian chose a lion.
This guy couldn't paint.
Aleks chose to have the head of the Bakugan in his pocket painted on his face. It doesn't really look anything like that.
Most exciting, however, was that as I got Aleks settled to get painted, I turned around and Bastian was gone. I kept looking all about and didn't see him. Then I alerted all our friends nearby, still looking all around Harmony park. It was mostly enclosed, but there were two large openings with no gates - one lead to a parking lot via a patch of grass, the other to the music stage of the street fair. Emma and her friends from school went to the festival portion in search while I started towards the parking lot. Barbara kept an eye on Aleks for me. I saw Steve coming towards me with Jonas, but he hadn't seen Bastian. Behind him was Joy, Barbara's daughter, who also didn't see him. Then I saw his little hood coming down the way with a grown-up lady. Someone had found him! As it turned out, it was another unschooling family who thought they recognized the little boy standing in the parking lot. The mom told me he was quite good and when asked where his mother was replied, simply, "over there!" pointing towards Harmony Park. Thank goodness!

Afterwards, we ventured off in search of food, running into tons of folks from our neighborhood, including the girl who was to babysit for the first time on Monday. The boys liked her immediately, as I knew they would.

We bought each of the boys a tie-dyed t-shirt from a young woman who I'd never met, but who reads this blog! That was especially exciting! Hello!

Lastly, we got superman ice cream from the front porch at which it is always sold, and settled into the clothing booth of friends from our local mama group in order to eat it. Just when I started to worry that I had no idea how Papa was going to find us amidst the throbbing masses, he walked by! Aleks & Bastian got piggyback rides back to the car and we enjoyed the rest of a peaceful evening at home.