Utah Arts Festival

Aaron got free tickets for the Utah Arts Festival from his work, so on Saturday we invited Kelly and Esther to go with us and we headed down to Salt Lake to check it out. They had a pretty cool kids section. My favorite part was the instrument petting zoo. They had a big table with a whole bunch of instruments laid out on it. When the kids came up they could pick any instrument and the volunteers working the table would help them play it. Lincoln and Ivan both picked the violin, and with a lot of help, played Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

They had booths set up, and at each booth was a different sort of art project the kids could do. At one of them they painted scales to put on a large paper mache dragon. At another they did charcoal drawing. And at another they decorated planter boxes and planted melon seeds. At another they stamped little bags full of wildflower seeds.

All over the park they had "random acts of art", we got a picture in from of a Mini Cooper that was covered in knit. They had knitted things all over, just randomly everywhere.

Throughout the park they had stages set up, and every hour there was a different act on each stage. The first one we went to see was a modern dance company that was putting on their interpretation of Lewis Carol's Through the Looking Glass. It was pretty cool. I've alway liked modern dance, even though I think it's kind of weird, but weird in a good way. At one point Esther and I looked over at Aaron and Kelly who were holding Lincoln and Ivan on their shoulders, and we just laughed, and agreed that we needed a picture.

 Kelly and Ivan, Aaron and Lincoln

After the dance performance, we left the park for a little bit to go get dinner at Papa Johns. Then we came back and caught the tail end of a fiddle band. It was probably my favorite, I wish we would have seen the whole thing.

My boys got pretty into it too. We had to keep reminding them to not run into the other people sitting on the grass.

After that we went and saw a percussion group who played on every day items like buckets and pots and pans. They were pretty cool too, but not as impressive as I was originally thinking they were going to be. Still worth listening to though.

After that my kids were pretty hot, tired, and squirmy. So we went over to a little fountain they had and let the kids play around in the water. That seemed a good cure, even Adelia was happier afterward.

After that we needed a place to go to strip the kids down and dry their clothes out. We found a nice grassy patch and wrapped them up in blankets while we rung out their clothes. There was salsa music in the background for awhile from one of the stages, and it was fun to listen to and just relax on the grass. We got some great smiles out of Asher too.

We kept the kids up way, way past their bedtimes, so we could see the last show, which was a Brazilian group that did a fire dance as part of their act. The fire part was pretty amazing.

We had a fun day, and I was glad we got to spend it with Kelly and Esther and Asher. I still think the arts festival we went to when we lived in Dallas was better, but this one was fun too, and I'm glad we went.