The Search for Miss Direction: Peachy Dragon Racing

Last night turned into one of the best Friday nights I can remember in recent history. The fireworks were great! We found a great place to park where we opened the back of my Rav, all piled in and cuddled and watched a great 30 minute display where we all constantly oohed and aahed. Noah's "it sounds like bacon, Mom" and Mikayla's "I love you, silly Birthday Boy" still have me smiling.

And our great weekend continued today. This morning Grant and the kiddos headed to Lowe's for a build of another character from Planes (I'm thinking we're going to have to take Noah to see this sooner rather than later...). Then after a quick lunch we all loaded up and head to Lake Orion for the Dragon on the Lake Festival.

About 40 minutes away, the kiddos and I had been to Lake Orion just over a year ago for a great event they had where local businesses made their own mini golf hole that the public could then come in and play. I was bummed to write to the city and find out that budgetary reasons had led them to cut the event this year, but they did sign me up to receive their weekly events newsletter which is how I heard about this festival.

Downtown was turned into quite the festival with food, merchants, an awesome kids area and an art fair. Nearby Lake Orion played host to dragon boat races. I'd never seen a dragon boat in person before so this was really cool. Unfortunately, they teams were only practicing today, no actual races, but we did get to see them out and about. 20 people all working together can really get those boats moving! Next year we'll plan a bit better and go on Sunday so we can see more of the actual racing, though the rest of the festival was tons of fun, too. We had frozen custard, checked out some ducks that were up to quite the antics, jumped on some inflatables and spent a good chunk of time at the fire department. Not only did they both get to climb into the fire truck and check it out more up close and personal than they ever have before, but they got to use the actual fire hoses!!! Noah was awestruck.

Coming home, we celebrated National Peach Pie Day. Well, kind of. As I mentioned earlier in the week, I'm over the dessert thing this week. It seemed like it was one dessert after another to celebrate this week and I just couldn't bear the thought of making an entire peach pie and then try to convince everyone here to eat it. I didn't even want to turn it into cookies or something else. Over dessert. This led me to stumble across how we actually celebrated - Beef Peach Pie! Looks like peach pie, tastes like meatloaf. While it wasn't a home run (Grant admitted to liking my meatloaf much more) everyone ate it without a fuss and said it was 'pretty good' Five points to me for coming up with a peach pie alternative :)

In other big news - Mikayla's teacher assignment for school came in today's mail. We were THRILLED to find out that like her big brother, she's going to have Mrs. Porto! We love Mrs. Porto. Grant and I are thrilled and I know Kayla's delighted. Oh, and along those same lines, on our way to the fireworks last night we stopped to let them get their book bags for school. My eldest will be sporting (no surprise here) a very cool U of M bag, while my baby girl found herself a Cinderella bag that I can't get her to let go of. Only a little over a week *sigh*

Tigers just wrapped up their game for a win! Max Scherzer is a beast :-p 19-1 awesome!

It's supposed to be warm here tomorrow, so we're looking into finding a spray park to take the kiddos to. Plus we'll be celebrating whiskey sours. Should be quite the day. Until then...