WorldPride

This past week and a bit WorldPride celebrations have been going on in Toronto.

With bedtime and babysitters, it's not nearly as easy as it once was for us to go out, as I'm sure some of you can relate.  And honestly, Jen and I aren't big partiers, but we did want to take part in at least some of the festivities.  

We found out that one of our favourite bands was playing in the headlining spot the closing night of the event.  The show was advertised as starting at 7pm.  A bit of a stretch for the little ones, but surely doable to take them along.  The Bean was pretty excited about it.  

A few weeks ago a friend, who is a designer, posted that her company was designing all the official merch for the event and she was looking for people to march with her contingent in the parade.  Now, as I said before, I'm not really super into Pride, but this was WorldPride and we had the opportunity to march in it.  I mean, that's pretty frickin' cool.  I shot her a message to figure out details.  Unfortunately, the parade fell dead in the middle of nap time the same day as the concert. Jen and I agreed that trying to do both was probably pushing it.

So we made plans to go to Family Pride on Saturday morning and closing concert on Sunday evening.  Then we found out that the headliners for the closing concert weren't scheduled to take the stage until close to 10pm.  Change of plans.  Our go-to babysitters actually asked us to see if we wanted them to watch the kids so we could go to the concert when we told them.  Sounded good to us.  I got back in touch with our friend and asked if it'd be too late to join the parade.  She said that it wasn't and that she'd be happy to have us.  

Saturday morning we headed down to the family event.  The kids had a good time running around participating in a lot of what they had to offer --train rides, bouncy castles, games, etc.  (I remembered my camera, but forgot the SD card, so we have no photos.)  We also ran into Ashleigh and Teagan from 2moms2dogs2babies, Jessica and Sadie from MommaOak, and Alex from Half a Dozen of the Other.

Sunday after lunch we loaded the kids into their strollers and headed downtown.  We made it right at the scheduled time, then we waited.  And waited.  And waited.  Sprout eventually fell asleep for a much-needed nap while The Bean made friends with the other people in our group.  Sprout woke up and The Bean started losing it just as we were ready to start the parade (many hours behind schedule).  

Though again things hadn't really gone as planned, both kids did remarkably well once we started walking.  They waved to people and blew kisses (adorable!) and seemed to enjoy watching the people in both the parade and the crowd.  

We finished marching and treated both kids to a huge popsicle before heading on the subway back home.  We were all exhausted.  Jen and I decided to forego the concert and instead finished up the second season of OITNB.  I sort of regret this decision (favourite band, WorldPride, a big rainbow over the whole event after a crazy cloudburst -seriously!) but I also know that we would have barely been able to function if we had gone.  

Nothing quite as planned, but a once in a lifetime opportunity and a fun celebration of Pride with the whole family.