Balloon Fiesta!

One of the best weeks of the year in Albuquerque is Balloon Fiesta. It covers two weekends and the week in between. Balloonists from all over the world come to join together in some amazing events. Our favorites are the mass ascensions, where sometimes hundreds of them will all lift off from Balloon Fiesta park in maybe an hour or so.

This year our kids had Thursday and Friday off for "fall break" (which really means "Balloon Fiesta break" around here). We decided to go down to the field on Friday, but on Thursday morning the girls and I were up at 7:00am and decided to run down to the bridge over the river and see if the balloons were out. They like to try to touch the river if the wind is right.


There were 5 or 6 of them up by the river, but the wind wasn't quite right for them to try to descend and touch.








The really cool part was that the wind was blowing west, so the balloons from the mass ascension were all coming across the river towards us (though a few miles north). It was beautiful!


The girls had never walked across this bridge before, but it's the one we drive across in rush hour traffic every school day, so it was kind of fun to see it from a new perspective.




On Friday morning we all woke up at 5:30am and blearily (but excitedly) got dressed in our warm clothes. The kids love going to mass ascensions, and Matt and I do too. (Otherwise there is no way we'd drag them out of bed so early!) When you go on a weekday you don't need to leave quite as early as you do on a weekend, a small mercy. Really we hardly had to wait around in traffic at all - going on a Friday is great! (It can be an hour or more in traffic on weekend mornings.)

It wasn't even all that cold - some years we are seriously freezing, but we eventually took off our jackets. You can see the sack of fresh mini-donuts in Pierce's hand - they are our favorite fair and fiesta food and we each got our own bag this year. Mmmmmmmm.


When we got to the park I realized that I had charged but forgotten to change out my battery. It was already flashing when I started taking my first picture, so I knew I would have to be judicious because my pictures were going to be limited. Luckily I had charged the small camera up, and I think Pierce took a couple hundred pictures - I haven't gone through them yet. But it's hard to go wrong with balloon pictures so I bet they are great!


Friday morning was a "special shape" mass ascension, so there were a relatively lot of the cool shaped balloons that we (and everyone) especially love. Here are a few pictures of our favorites.


The carriage wasn't quite blown up yet, thus the floppy wheels.


The first picture of our family was in front of the fireman's hat before he was inflated. So cool.





Yoda is new this year. I love that he got to hang out with Darth. They turned around eventually but obviously I didn't get a picture of that.


Such a giant Elvis.






The shark is new this year, as is the whale (coming later).


Even with people in the shot it's hard to tell the scale. The special shapes are sometimes twice or more the height of normal balloons.








Zoe especially loves the butterfly (of course).






Some of the special shapes... I look at and wonder who would pay the exorbitant sum of money they cost for... a beaver with a hat and weird small arms? The roadrunner, sticking his tongue out? What do they use these things for??? There is a giant battery, a giant Alpo can, giant cans of soda... I guess I can see it when there is a sponsor, but how about the giant basketball that's stuck in the hoop? Just weird (sorry, didn't get pictures of all of those).






The big brown mushroom-looking balloon turned out to be a liberty bell, it was pretty cool.




We liked the flags this balloon was carrying.




Another successful Balloon Fiesta - done! We had no guests this year (you should really come and see this next year!) but I think we really enjoyed it anyway.

Pierce turns 11 years old!

Pierce's birthday fell on a Wednesday this year, which was rather disappointing to him because he had homework to do. But - he planned ahead and did as much of it ahead of time as he could, and actually I think he only had a few minutes of homework as it turned out. He had been sooooooooo excited for his birthday that I was almost afraid it would be a letdown for him, but he had a great day. He and I made bacon maple cookies to take to school to share to celebrate - the kids liked them (and I did too) except the vegetarian kids in his class (oops). I didn't take any pictures of those, but I should have (bacon sprinkles!).

His birthday also happened to fall exactly on his last pack meeting where he crossed over to the 11 year old scouts. He and Bridger (his friend in the football pants) had already gotten their webelos award and their arrow of light, but they got a couple more pins so here they are celebrating by doing the "bow and arrow" cheer.



(Note - Pierce told me the day before that it would be nice if I ran over to the scout office to get him the new shirt. But I had just been there the day before, and it's not close or convenient, and I kind of hate going there, so he gets to wait a bit. In fact he's still waiting a couple of weeks later. Bridger has the advantage because he has 4 older brothers, one of whose old shirt he is certainly wearing.)

Then came the big moment - here he is, crossing over from cub scouts to the boy scout program!






The other boys in the 11 year old scouts were very eager to put on his neckerchief and welcome him to the group. It's really nice that Matt is one of their leaders now.


Matt is especially glad to have Pierce join his troop, because the kids he has right now are pretty wild. He hopes that Pierce will be an obedient and calming influence.




One of his other leaders is our old bishop, Bridger's dad. Pierce was reallllly looking forward to having him, then he just got called as the stake Young Men's president, dang it. Their other new leader seems like a great guy too, luckily.


Pierce and scouts. I did really enjoy my 2 years as his den mother. The boys in his group were (mostly) a really great group of kids. (These kind of crazy ones here are about to age out and become deacons - they only overlap by a couple of weeks.) I loved working with the boys, especially when they were enthusiastic about what they could achieve. Pierce and his friends were especially excited to get the "panda" conservation badge, and the leave no trace badge. I worked with them for the wolf and bear ages, and then I got a new calling and he lost a little enthusiasm with his new leader (also some of the boys moved away, it's hard to have a small group). So he didn't end up super loving scouts - I think a big part of the problem is the busyness of our lives. I'm hoping that he will be really excited to work with Matt. Already they've passed off some swimming stuff, which is a breeze of course for Pierce.


Here's their current group: Pierce, Michael, Keoki, Jett, Calhan, and Bridger.


Then after scouts it was time for cake! Pierce chose a pretty strange cake. It's called "Bee Sting Cake" and it was really a pastry, not a cake. It was bread made of brioche dough with a pastry cream between the layers. It was different but good.


11 candles!






Happy birthday to Pierce! We love him very much and we're so happy to have him in our family. Thank heaven we have one more year before he turns 12! I'm not ready to have 2 kids in the youth program just yet.


When it was time to plan Pierce's birthday party, he kind of came up blank on ideas. Then he told me he wanted a surprise party. It's a little tricky to surprise someone with a party when that's what they wanted. But we gave it a shot. We picked him up from school on Friday, along with 2 of his friends, and took them to Hinkle Family Fun - it's not crowded on Friday afternoons (the kids have 1/2 days on Friday) and there are tons of great things to do. He and his friends had a blast, and Zoe and Mattie had a lot of fun too. The main thing the boys wanted to do was drive the go-carts. Pierce was BARELY tall enough, his friend Dallin was easily tall enough, and his friend Andy was not quite tall enough but they did let him drive a couple of times anyway. Of course Mattie was plenty tall, but she was not allowed to drive Zoe with her, not until she is 16 and has a driver's license (because driving a car is so much like driving a go-cart). This made Zoe sob with disappointment, but she quickly cheered up when she got to ride the bumper boats a bunch of times. (And eventually both Matt and I bought a ride pass and gave her go-cart rides too.) She soaked everyone she could - mostly total strangers who probably didn't appreciate it at all.


She and Mattie totally soaked each other - fortunately it was pretty warm.


There are also bumper cars in a little dark area that is very hard to take pictures of with my phone. All the stuff behind the bumper car shadows are actually reflections in mirrors.


There are also lots of other fun things to do, like laser tag (which they did many times), a climbing wall, mini-golf (nobody want to do that except Zoe), some laser games, a fun trampoline, and probably something else I'm forgetting. Here's Pierce jumping. I think Zoe did too but she wouldn't flip.






We also ran Pierce to a quick water polo game (not really quick), pizza, and then back for more laser tag, bumper cars, and go-carts. It was a really fun way to celebrate, and he claims to really have been surprised. Happy birthday Pierce! We love you!

I've been working on some moon pictures - here is kind of a spooky moon that we had a couple of nights later.

Some very funny pictures from the JCC

I just want to say that these pictures were hanging on the wall at the Jewish Community Center. We found them when Pierce played his last water polo tournament games this weekend. So I am not at all making fun of Jews by including these in my blog. But they are so, so, funny.