International Festival!

Today we attending Raleigh’s own International Festival!  This is one of my favorite fall events, though with how packed our fall schedule inevitably is, we don’t always make it out.  This year, bringing two mobile children to a packed and noisy convention center presented a new set of challenges.  All in all, though, we had a great time.  We sampled foods from Nepal, Thailand, Japan, Poland, France, India, Vietnam, probably more. 🙂  We watched many different performances, and the kids seemed to enjoy it.  Kendall really liked the South Asian and South American dances, she bopped along to the beat, standing up on my lap.  I think the brightly-colored costumes appealed to her as well.  Brian spent some time at the Netherlands booth, trying on the wooden shoes, and painting a picture (of an American flag) at the “Make your own Mondrian” station.  Wandering around, we found a “dance demonstration” area, which was more of an audience participation space.  There was a Zumba demo going on (I think its a Latin-inspired fitness dance thing), and the kids just had to go in once they heard the heavy beats.  Well, to our surprise, Brian sat down, and Kendall just had to dance!  We eventually had to set her free and let her join the party unrestrained.  A few songs later, some other small children had joined her!  She danced non-stop for at least half an hour, and we could not get her to leave without a fight!  I took some video–you can see her at the beginning, where we gave up on holding onto the monkey backpack (please don’t judge us for leashing our child–she’s super-fast and we do what we must to keep her safe!) and part 2, closer to the end where she was getting tired.  We got lots of comments about how cute she was!  After all of this activity, Kendall actually fell asleep in our arms during one of the later performances.  We had some dessert (crepes!  green tea ice cream!) and thought it was hilarious how much Kendall liked the green tea ice cream (Brian was not a fan!)  Later tonight, we were not so amused, since Kendall was in rare form, pogo-ing and headbanging in her crib, and would not go to sleep!  We blame the green tea. 😉  One of the final things we just had to do was let Brian get a balloon animal.  The lines for this had been so long all day, I’d been hoping we could avoid it.  But he insisted, so strongly, we eventually gave in.  It took forever, and we had to wait with him in shifts to keep Kendall halfway sane, but he did get his prize–a tiger balloon that he was incredibly proud of.  A funny Brian moment happened when we first walked in–he saw a giant inflatable Geico Gecko, and yelled out “Car insurance!  Mommy Daddy look, car insurance!!”  I guess he sees a lot of Geico ads during hockey games on TV. 😉