No Rain on our Parade!

I love parades. As a kid growing up in a small town our Fair Days were a big deal. Our family always had a few entries in the parade. Antique tractors, a float for the store my dad ran and an antique car or 2. I also would get to be on either the skating club float, or in one of the cars or my favourite thing was decorating my bike.

So it comes as no surprise that my kids love the parade too.  It has been a bit iffy if we even get to see it the last 2 years because there always seems to be a soccer tournament happening that weekend. And this year was no exception. My husband had board meetings, my son had a soccer tournament and the kids wanted to be in the parade.

Luckily the soccer schedule worked in our favour! So decorating bikes was full steam ahead.

This was our daughters first summer confident on her bike so she was super stoked! I admit she was a little concerned about making around 2 times, but I said I would be be close at hand to help her if she needed it. And she had a big brother watching over her as well to lend support.

So here are the 2 entries my kids did.

First was my daughter as a box of popcorn. Okay here I admit my husband and I are slight hoarders. Well it has now paid off. Pretty much everything I needed for this was in our possession. I did have to go buy extra supplies as I ran out of 2 things.

We started off with a regular cardboard box, my mom had just cleaned out her condo from moving last year and I had snagged a couple. It is what gives strength to the get up. I just cut the flaps off the top and bottom. Then I took  white bristol board and taped it together to make long enough to wrap the box. I then grabbed red duct tape ( one of the things I had to buy more of). And just eyeballed it and made the vertical stripes. You can't really see it but the top edge is scalloped. The popcorn logo. Scammed off the internet, printed it out and traced that onto white paper and colored it with red sharpies, which I went through 3 of.

  Now the popcorn on top. There was some trial and error. More error than trial. But I learned alot. I used the expanding foam "THE GREAT STUFF". (** side note:I was gonna get no name but I had no idea what color it was and I knew this brand was the right color. So if anyone knows I would appreciate if you could tell me if Rona's brand name foam is the same color, would have saved me a couple bucks). I took plastic grocery bags, put them in red solo cups and made a little round cup out of the bag then sprayed the expanding foam in the bag and then overflowed the foam. Now here is where I had a few errors. Expanding foam will not harden if it doesn't have air. So the stuff in the cup part of the bag sitting in the red cup will not harden and  it will stay squishy. I did carefully peel off the bag of the still squishy foam and it did harden in a roundish shape to make the top part of the popcorn. Does this make sense at all? If you need pictures to understand message me and I can do that in another post.

To attach the popcorn to the box, I took wooden shish-kabob skewers and poked the popcorn with the sharp end and just taped the skewer to the inside of the box.  I also attached straps inside the box to go over my girls shoulders to keep the popcorn box dropping from rubbing on her tires. The way it worked with her bike, I did cut a few slits in front so it kinda rested on her front bike frame. And her knees didn't knock it around too much from her pedalling.

                                                       This is a canoe...NOT A BOAT!!!

This was our guys get up. Pretty simple actually. We had just bought a desk and had long pieces of cardboard. So we just drew the shape we wanted and he cut them out, took black paint to paint the woodgrain on it. Took black duct tape to the edges. And that was the canoe. He had a fishing pole off the back that was just a bamboo stake with string tied to it and a cardboard fish ( which now I realize I should have got him to paint a bright color) tied on. We just duct taped the pole to the back of the canoe. He had a white pail in front with Bait marked on it and her threw candy out. He put on his life jacket and away he went.

 A little bit of engineering had to happen. Figuring how to keep the boat shape but have space for him to pedal was the feat. So we tied the sides open to his handle bars and put string for straps over his shoulders from the back end, which were covered by his life jacket. It worked perfectly.

It was great. Our girl had a little trouble with the box popping up so she couldn't at times, and not many people could see her face and wasn't sure who was in that box of popcorn.

But proudly our girl won first place for the bike entry and our guy got third. I stood back and looked at them and thought...guess what the kids are gonna wear for Halloween...costumes done!! Might be a challenge getting in and out of the car, but I'll figure something out.