I have to confess that writing something about the children’s festival in St. Albert has been on my mind since my wife started bugging me about blogging.  To start off, if you live in the Edmonton area and have not attended St. Albert’s Northern Alberta International Children’s Festival you have been missing out on an amazing event.

My family and I are working our 14th year right now as volunteers at the Children’s Festival!  What I thought I would do this year is try to update a daily diary of the 5 day event… but I blew it already by not posting the day I started driving for the festival.

The event is five days of children’s performers and kids getting together in an explosion of fun and imagination but there are a couple of days of picking performers up at the airport and driving them to and from the hotel and sound checks and so forth. Then there are a couple days of driving the performers all back to the airport so they can get home or to festivals in Saskatoon or Winnipeg.

A huge sandcastle

Tuesday

After a wonderful morning of team leading in the Chinese Calligraphy tent I enjoyed a quick lunch and spent the afternoon in the Save-On-Foods Healthy Kids tent.

It was great to learn something about Chinese culture as well as calligraphy and I also learned so much about our local Mandarin schools where student learn in a Mandarin Immersion program  I thought we did this just for French Immersion because of Canada’s second language but Mandarin schools was a surprise to me.  Stephen Tsang’s daughter, Megan, has gone there her whole life and she is helping out in his tent this week.

a few of my kidlets playing in some amazing sand

I spent the afternoon at the Save On Foods Healthy Kids tent where kids watched a puppet show and learned about healthy food choices and then did a quick class on how to build a sandcastle in the largest sandbox I had ever seen.  The tent used to have a 20 foot snakes and ladders game but after several years of playing that game the kids sure are loving the sandbox.