A Picnic

Yesterday was our annual all-church family Pig-nic. It was held at a local park. Now, I think in the 10 years that we've lived here and attended this church we've gone to this picnic once before. We always talk about going, but when the time comes, for whatever reason, we haven't gone. Last year we didn't go because it was during naptime and we didn't want Alison to skip her nap.

This year we decided to throw caution to the wind, let Alison skip her nap and go. The church provides the meat (plain or bbq pork), beverages, and table service. We were to bring a dish to share, for a couple, or two dishes for a family (we only brought one dish, since we only have a small child who shares what we eat), and a few dollars to help cover the cost of the meat. So we picked up the fixings for an easy, and rather large, taco salad when we went shopping after church, threw it together quickly when we got home and headed off to the park.

It looked like a pretty good turn out. We had two pavilions reserved and they were both pretty full. There were lots families with smaller children (pre-school and younger), and quite a few from the senior set. There were not a whole lot of families with middle and high school aged kids, much to the chagrin of one of our youth group girls. She was disappointed that there were not more kids there her age.

There was quite a variety of food, too. I let Kevin go through the line first, and he came back with a lot of several different kinds of things. I employed a different tactic. I took small spoonfuls of just about everything. Everything was really good. We both shared with Alison. There was one particular pasta salad that she loved. Neither of us got to eat much of it. :) There was a pretty large assortments of desserts, too, most of it chocolate. That's where I really ended up looking like a pig because I took two different kinds of cake and a brownie. It was my intention to share with Alison. It's not my fault she didn't want more than one bite of cake!

After we finished eating, we had singing, accompanied by a couple of the highschool boys and their guitars. And there was Alison, when she wasn't running around, front and center dancing and "directing" the music. She was also very interested in the bounce house. We actually let her get into it a couple of times, after kicking the bigger kids out so she (and the reas of the smaller kids) wouldn't get squashed. She had a ball. She was fascinated by the flower that she had painted on her arm. We wrapped things up around 3:00.

Before we headed for home, we ran out to Home Depot to pick up some new hoses and some mulch. Once back in the car, Alison was singing along with her Oscar the Grouch CD one minute and the next minute she was sound asleep. Instead of going home, and having her wake up as soon as we pulled into the garage, we drove around for another 15 or 20 minutes so she could get a little nap. Once we did finally come home, we tried to get her out of the car without waking her up, but it didn't happen. She was wide awake and ready to go for the rest of the night.

All in all, I think we had a very nice afternoon.