Parade of Lights

This evening was the big event that the middle school band has been practicing for for two months- the Parade of Lights. The weather men had been predicting cold, wet weather for several days but it was actually quite pleasant for a December evening with only a little wind and no precipitation in any form in sight- it was much colder and wetter last year on the night of the parade. I dropped Bryce off at the school at 3 this afternoon, dressed in his black school hoodie and pants, jingle bells adorning his feet, a santa hat on his head and light strings wrapped around his trumpet. I hung around for a few minutes as the first thing on the schedule was to get a picture of the band all together.

a good looking bunch, aren't they? Bryce is fourth row from the front, four from the right- you can just barely see his head poking up behind the guy in front of him. Here's a closer picture taken after the 'serious' photos were finished and Mr. Lawrence let them loosen up a bit. Bryce is dead center on this one.
After photos were done they had one last practice time before they were bused downtown to wait for their turn to march in the parade. We finally left the house about 4:45 to head downtown- we had intended to leave a bit earlier, but by the time we finally got it figured out how we could record the live broadcast of the parade on a local TV station it was later than we thought. It turned out all right- we found a good spot near the end of the parade route with an unobstructed view and we ate a sack dinner while we waited for it to start.

This was one of the first floats to go by.
Sarah got into the parade atmosphere and was waving back to everyone who went by for a while. She was starting to get really restless by the time the HMS band finally got near our spot on the route. She wasn't too happy with us when we told her she couldn't run around in the street.
Here comes the HMS band!




and there is Bryce- second row in this pic, second from the right with the light strings on his trumpet all lit up as they marched by us.They did really well- they were just as good as the better high school bands we saw tonight. They were certainly one of the biggest bands in the parade, and the only middle school there out of the 12 bands. There was a judging category for marching bands in the parade, but I don't know when those results are announced. To wrap things up, here are a few more of my favorite floats.

and the Sand Creek High School marching band- where our kids will attend when they get to HS age. (Their mascot is the scorpion- ick! who chose that?? at least they have nice colors- also red and black like the HMS colors)




and favorite float of all of the kids in our block - the Chik-Fil-A dancing cows- they were doing the chicken dance when they went by us LOL
some hot firefighters (literally in both senses of the word LOL!)

and Santa in his sleigh always closes the parade.
I was very productive at TrinityCrop last night and actually got my CD Calendar pages finished up- whoo hoo! one thing crossed off of my long holiday to-do list! Hopefully I can get a Christmas card of some sort put together tomorrow, and then I can start sorting out scrapbook LOs for printing.