Dallas Arts Festival

Today there was the Dallas Arts Festival. Admission was free, so we decided it would be fun to check it out. We invited our good friends Brian and April Updike to go with us. The weather was beautiful at first, not too hot. Instead of fighting traffic and parking downtown we opted to ride the DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit). We loaded up our stroller with everything we thought we could possibly need (which mostly meant lots and lots of water) and met Updikes at the DART station. When we got downtown we had to walk a few blocks to the Arts Festival. It was cool though, they had all different genres of bands playing, one about every block or so. They also

had tons of booths set up where you could look at all kinds of art. Everything from paintings to flower pens. And even better, people were handing out free stuff left and right. It reminded me a lot of Hooper Tomato Days, only HUGE.

We also discovered that the museums were all open for free today. So to get the pregnant lady
(April) and the baby (Lincoln) out of the sun, and because you just can't pass up a free museum, we decided to do that. My two favorite parts of the Museum of Art were the room where all the art work was made out of office supplies (i.e. paper clips, rubber bands, folder clips, straws, etc.) and the soup carving activity. One of the pieces of art featured at the museum were two busts a woman had done of herself, one made out of chocolate and one made out of soap. I guess to see if

the texture was similar. Anyways, the museum had set up an activity where they passed out bars of soap and let the visitors carve their own sculptures. I have to say that our little group did pretty well. April carved a giraffe, Brian did a decorative rock looking design, Aaron did a swan,
and I started out doing a lemon and then it broke so I switched and made a ship which did have a sail originally, but then that broke, so then it turned into more of a canoe looking sculpture. Anyways, we put them together and WAH-LA, Noah's Ark finding land. There were also a lot of really great paintings, and a whole Ancient Greek section, which was awesome.

When we went back outside to have lunch it was SUPER warm out. Somehow Lincoln managed to fall asleep in the stroller though, while we hunted for a place to eat. We ended up eating Gyro sandwiches, and they were very tasty.

One of the booths had one of those strong man measurers, where you pick up a mallet and hit the plat form and then a little ball goes up and measures how strong you are. Aaron decided to try it out because if you got above 60 you got a free frisbee. Not only did he go above 60, but he dinged the bell at the top! Way to go Aaron, you are soooooo strong. :)

Then we headed to another museum, a sculpture museum this time. Some of the sculptures were really cool, and some of them I just flat out did not understand, like the one that is a long metal pole that reaches clear up into the sky and all along the pole there are people walking up it, and then on the ground more people standing there watching. I guess I don't have an artistic enough brain.

After that is was time to go, because Lincoln was hot and tired and hungry. I was really proud of him for how good he was about being cooped up in the stroller for the whole entire day. He did really well. It gives me hope that he will be good on our four hour plane ride to Portland on Monday.