Cold Spaghetti

Thanks to Emmy for the invite and to the thoughtfulness of a friend who comped us the tickets, we enjoyed Oshner’s Double Shot Under the Big Top Children’s Health Center fund raiser. Emmy brought Ana and I brought Will — making it a special night out with Mommy for our big kids. We met up with other friends (Emmy’s neighbor, Georgia, who is the owner of The Bead Shop, and her daughter Amaya, who is about the same age as Kate).

Ana and Will are great friends and watching them was a delight. For example, when Ana was scared to go alone down the big slide, Will climbed up and held her hand for the trip down.
Strong man and bathing beauty. This was set up over by the dunking booths, where Will was obsessed with wanting to “dunk someone.” I told him that it was a real bummer we’d forgotten to bring Daddy, because he would have LOVED being dunked.
There were several jugglers and street performers. Both Will and Ana held the spinning plate.

Photography aside: I used the 24mm lens that my Mom washed (three times) in the washing machine when it returned from the Grand Canyon wrapped up in Dad’s clothes. Amazingly, the lens works — and it works well! It’s a bit clunkier in auto-focus, but still faster than I would have thought. Manual works fine (with kids around, I often use auto because they move so much — otherwise, I prefer manual). Although it seemed very sensitive to exposure and gave a lot of flare in different situations. This may also be a bit of user error because I’m experimenting more with exposure after playing around with this during sunset shots with Matt. Because I don’t really have any time to set up shots in this type of setting, I didn’t get any of Will with the plate properly exposed. Bummer, because one of them is really cool. But I did get some cute shots of Ana. (I pixelated this one a bit to get some more subject focus — the result of me having trouble with auto focus.)
In addition to the inflatables and performers, there were 5 huge inflatables, a silent auction (we all put in for a variety of stuff but got outbid at the last second), jewelry making (the kids made key chains), t-shirt decorating (Will’s is Very Will, in that most things are completely colored all in black), cookie decorating, and a TON of seriously great food from local restaurants. All free!

Radio Disney was there and had a dance-a-thon, hula-hoop contests, and group dancing. Ana and Will were mesmerized.
Then Ana started to pick up some of the moves.

After dancing, they decided they wanted to go back to the Big Slide (see it in the background, behind the stilt walker?) That was when Will made his move:
(He was very sweetly helping her down from the curb, as Emmy and I stood behind giggling.)

And off they go!