Chinese New Year Parade

Chinese New Year was February 8th. Friday morning I saw something about the Chinese New Year Parade in San Francisco. According to some unnamed source (Parades International? Official parade score standings by an unbiased committee?) the SF Chinese New Year Parade is one of the top 10 parades in the world. (I do wonder where Mardi Gras krew parades and the Rose Bowl Parade rank in the standings.) I mentioned to T that it sounded cool, but it was an evening parade. We tried to get a babysitter, but couldn't so we just decided to take the girls and view it as an experiment. If things deteriorated quickly we would just turn around and deal with the screaming.

But things went really well. The parade didn't start until 5:15. The girls were both happy (well, Pippa slept) on the hour car ride into the city. We found parking decently close. We found a good place to stand with only one row of people in front of us. Our parade spot was conveniently right in front of one of T's work offices so we had the option to go in his office and watch from the 4th floor (plus access to non-public bathrooms).

The view from the 4th floor before the parade started. You can see me in the red hoodie right under the tree.

We decided not to bring the stroller and just the baby carrier. Roxy was entertained by tangling her self up in it while we waited for the parade to start.

The SF Chinese New Year parade really is better than most parades because in addition to marching bands, floats, and dancers there are dragons (Pippa said they were chasing lollipops because they were hungry), martial arts guys, and fireworks.

There were huge dragons like this one and smaller ones with just two people in them. The smaller ones would come right over to the people in the crowd. The girls loved the dragons.

Most of the time Pippa was on T's shoulders and Roxy was on my shoulders. Both girls really loved waving to everyone in the parade and of course they got a ton of waves back. Pippa waved at everyone the whole way back to the car when we left. Once T took Pippa off his shoulders, but her legs had fallen asleep and she couldn't stand! So he held her like a tiny baby for a while. Sometimes when there was a little break I would put Roxy on the ground. She would demand "up!" so I would pick her up then she would tap the top of my head and demand "up!" again.

 After a while it was getting more crowded and we were tired of holding the girls up so we went up into T's office building and watched more of the parade from the 4th floor.

We didn't stay until the end (someone said it would go until 9:00?!) so we missed the HUGE dragon and the HUGE fireworks, but the girls had already seen fireworks and dragons and it was already past bedtime and we still hadn't had dinner yet, so we left early. At least we missed traffic :)