the accidental st. patrick's day...

I don't usually decorate for St. Patrick's day.  If I think far enough in advance maybe, just maybe I'll wear something green for the fun of it.  We're not Irish, you see, so I find it pretty silly to do so.  But as Harland informed me yesterday, he is part Irish.  I know, I know.  Way to not know this after 9 and a half years of marriage Amy.  I can barely keep my own heritage straight.  Or maybe it's because I have so ingrained in me the story of how my Grandmother Sylvia caught wind of my parents wanting to name one of the boys Ryan and informing them that she would NOT be calling the child by that Irish name.  She would come up with her own name.  Now don't go getting all upset and calling her prejudiced or anything.  I mean, she was, clearly.  But that was a generation in Jersey City when all the Irish, Germans, Italians, etc, each lived in very defined sections of town, and did not intermingle all that much.  That being said, my grandmother was Swedish and my grandfather was German, and they obviously intermingled, so someone please explain that to me??  Anyway, needless to say, none of us ended up named Ryan, or any other Irish name for that matter.

So now I suppose we'll have to start decorating for St. Patrick's day in 2012.

Abby has had an unexplained high fever since Friday.  No other real symptoms, but just knocked out by the fever.  On Saturday morning the fever was down, and I didn't want to stay in the house all day, so we drove out to PA to walk around Allentown for some fresh air and to catch a late lunch.  We stopped at the cemetery to pay respects to my grandma Anne, which sparked a whole lot of interesting six year old questions about death, dying and more importantly, "Their bodies are WHERE?!".  It was an educational experience.  Ha!

As we're walking downtown, we notice a crowd forming, and a TV crew.  And as we see a sea of green and more red heads than you typically see gathered in one location, it dawns on us, we've stumbled on a St. Patrick's day parade.  So without notice we just found a spot and hung around waiting for the parade to start.  The girls didn't believe that this wasn't our plan all along, and in hindsight, I'm thinking we should have let them think we were clever like that.  Oh well.

This was also the first chance I've really had to play with my new lens.  I've been saving my pennies for a while (a long while...photography was not exactly an inexpensive hobby to get into!) and I'm pretty excited.  It's huge though, and my camera body can no longer sit flat.  But I hear it will be worth it.  I can see there is a learning curve involved, but I can see the potential and that once I understand it's personality better, I'm going to probably want to take the lens out to dinner and buy it flowers.

Waiting, waiting, waiting for the parade to start...It was a bit chilly, but about half way through the sun came out and it was glorious!  (I know you can't see the face of the dog behind Grace, but I wanted to steal it from it's owner and take it home with me. If you saw that sweet face, you would too.)

See how Grace and my faces are sharp, but that her statue of liberty hand/torch in back is sharp too?  This is one reason I see I'm going to l.o.v.e. the lens.  Hmm..I think my lens will require a name.

Harland was charged with holding Pursely, who had the best seat in the house for the parade.

My lens is a zoom lens (the one I had already was a fixed 50mm, which I also have much love for).  I'm enjoying zooming without moving again.  I was editing this picture and found three people were looking right at me.  It amused me:

This is just me playing with the zoom.  This is the same shot, but zoomed out all the way.  Enjoy the better half of the girl in the green sweatshirt:

While we were waiting, Grace was begging me to bring home the kitten (Pursely) she found on the street.  Grace can amuse herself with her imagination and a stuffed animal any place, anytime.  I love this about her. (Um, I know I'm the only one who cares, but I also loved how I was able to take this shot of her begging up against me.  My other lens would only have been able to fit her nose and one eye in the shot.)

And a shot of the actual parade.  Abby is now intrigued by Irish dancing.  She would like me to sign her up immediately.  She does a decent impression of one.  We had two older girls next to us that kept jumping in front of the girls when candy was thrown.  It was rather annoying.  The random people we were standing with were more annoyed by it than we were, I think, and they didn't have kids with them.

So accidentally stumbling on a St. Patrick's day parade was a great way to waste an afternoon.  I highly recommend it.  As it turns out, my parents were in the area too, so we met them in Bethlehem for an early dinner, in which we discovered we all should have probably stayed home in the first place.  Both my parents are sick with some kind of sinus/cold/cough thing and as soon as we got into the restaurant, Abby's fever returned with a vengeance and she slept through the whole meal.  We took the day off today to recoup.