Festival Season Kicks Off

So over a month ago I noticed someone showing "interest" on Facebook in an event called Bear on the Square which takes place up toward the mountains in Dahlonega. I thought it looked kind of cute so I made note of it too, hoping maybe we could go. We love festivals, always have even in the BEFORE KIDS TIME and I'm hoping we really get back to them this year more often.

It's a challenge to take two severely autistic kids out to festivals. First of all there's the diapers - changing diapers in a port-a-potty is almost always impossible as you have to take off their shoes and I think we all know that standing barefoot or in socked feet in a port-a-potty is one of the circles of hell. Plus I think you'll get smallpox doing that, or something like smallpox. We're vaccinated but who wants to risk it?

I didn't know there WAS a bear to meet but we ran right into him when we got there. The kids all thought that was great.

The festival was a pretty damn good one. There were TONS of stringed instruments for sales, and folk crafts - (REAL crafts not stuff done with glue guns made at Michaels). Officially it was an Appalachian Art and Music Festival and it didn't disappoint at all. I kind of wanted to pick up this stringed instrument called a panjo, I am totally going to next time I see one. I have no idea why but it was pretty cool. Next time!

I usually pick up a piece of jewelry at these kind of festivals, and Julia was excited to get to pick up a ring as a souvenir. It's fun to have pieces that not everyone else has. The ring she picked up has the quality of being "purple" in my opinion. She was pretty excited however, so WIN for the almost 6 year old.

Now see this? This is $32 worth of root beer floats.

Festival food is always a crap shoot. Sometimes it's over priced, sometimes it's really reasonable. Sometimes it's amazing and OH WOW SO GOOD and sometimes it's like holy hell what did we just buy and why? Unfortunately this day we chose all the wrong food. ALL the wrong food. These root beer floats were possibly the WORST root beer I have EVER had, flat and warm with cheap ice cream in it. UGH not good. Oh yay we had free refills. We left the mugs behind because we didn't want reminders of this travesty of wasted money in our home.

That was possibly the only real low point however. There was the MOST immaculate port-a-potty in Christendom and I was able to change both twins without fear of plague and flesh eating bacteria being present. So that particular piece of Special Needs Parenting was actually pretty easy yesterday.

While my kids might identify their new balloon animal friends as the best part of their day, I have to say I think it was the music.

The entire place was like the O' Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack on fantastic repeat. If you like that sort of thing (which I do) it was pretty amazing. Every few feet there was another small group of either bluegrass or old timey musicians, playing and singing and it was just lovely. You didn't have to go find a spot at a main stage to hear the music, it was a few feet away while you bought soaps, rings, jellies, etc.

If you don't know the difference between Old Timey music and Bluegress the festival's website has some helpful information for you.

Ok it's funny, you should read it.

Home Depot had a booth set up for kids to do crafts, so our three little guys all made little wagons. It was evident Miles has been to Home Depot frequently with his class, as he grabbed the hammer immediately and went to work. He knew exactly what to do. Charlie wasn't quite as interested and needed a little more help but I think they all liked this part and now various princesses and Tigger have "a sick new ride" according to my oldest.

I'm going to have to have a better DIAPER plan for the summer festivals. Sometimes we just change in the van (not ideal for poop lemme tell you) so I'm going to be thinking on that a lot. I'm not going to let their diapers hold us back from all of the experiences out there for us. They loved the music, and they got new toys to play with and it was an all around great day.

Miles managed not to flip out over dogs, and we left with lots of handcrafted goodies to enjoy. Those two things alone were completely worth the day.

It was a perfect family day out. We need more of these.

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