First Night 2010

This year we had the opportunity to take the family to First Night Worcester 2010. I had seen in the paper that they had events starting at 4:00pm and "family-friendly" fireworks at 6:30pm! I was even able to get free buttons (tickets) from the BayState Parent magazine for the adults (kids under 10 are free) - thanks BayState Parent!

We grabbed out warm clothes and headed to Worcester. We were able to park for free at the Worcester Art Museum - which was exactly where we wanted to be for all of our activities. We started out at the Chinese Yo-yo presentation, which was hard for the Dandelion to sit through, but the Tumbleweed loved it. At the end she got to try out the yo-yos herself - which she was thrilled about (and took getting the yo-yo to work very seriously).

After that we headed over to the Worcester Art Museum which was hosting several events that we wanted to attend, but with limited time we had to choose only a couple. Since the Tumbleweed has shown a lot of interest in The Nutcracker this year, we opted for the Worcester Ballet Arts performance. It was very good. The Tumbleweed paid attention the whole time - even chair dancing with cute little hand-twinkling to the music (I guess you had to be there).

Once the performance was over, we went to find the craft rooms to make celebration hats. By this time the Dandelion was pretty tired, so only the Tumbleweed made one and we skipped the second craft despite the fact that the Tumbleweed would have loved to make a star-catcher. There was still a line at the star gazing telescope so we skipped that too. I was a little sad about that because I would have loved to hear the Tumbleweed say the entire "Star light, star bright" poem like she has been doing lately as she looks up into the night sky.

We were off to parade through the streets of Worcester behind a police car which both kids thought was very cool. We walked a few blocks to the Worcester Memorial Auditorium where the kids "made their own fireworks" [aka - stomped on bubble wrap] and watched the early fireworks display in the sky. Both kids were very excited to see the fireworks.












After the fireworks we decided to head home - although I would have loved to go see the trampoline and juggling acts that were taking place later into the evening. Maybe next year :) I think we did pretty well this year considering how little the kids are - and we did manage without the stroller (with 4 adults - meaning that maybe if I was an octopus we could do that on a regular basis...LOL)