The 2015 Children’s Festival finally put another main stage on the North Side of the river

Day 4 & 5

Well the festival is all but done except for a few lucky volunteers running performers back to
the airport so they can get on to their next performances in Saskatoon or Winnipeg or possibly
on their way back home to families and friends.

I kinda blew it with my plan to blog each day after the festival but I was working so many hours
on site that I never actually caught up on sleep.

Day 4

Day 4 was a fun day of volunteering in the Save On Foods tent again. I spent most of the day just talking to parents and pretending to be the guy who built the sand castle. Peter was probably tired of it but I was having a blast.

I did convince one of the mothers that our amazing sand came from the moon. She was very curious as to how we got it back here… unfortunately I did not milk that one for all it was worth.  If anyone wants to know more about what Peter has created in the past, check out the website for Amazing Sand.

The Save On Foods staff were handing out healthy snacks as fast as possible and the kids were gobbling them up. Princess Cydnee was back as someone but I don’t even remember who… I will have to dig up the pictures next week and make a post with all the family pics to figure that out.

Day 5

Day 5 was a much easier dress to remember because Cydnee wore two from Frozen. That is right. My princess actually did a costume change between the day in the festival site and the evening at the Finale (which she did not stay awake for).

In the morning I volunteered at Mandala Magic and had a great time helping kids and volunteers learn to play with colored rice and build mandalas. The instructor of the activity was well versed in her craft and had a genuine love of teaching.

Probably the coolest thing of this year’s festival was that the finale was not sold out on Saturday so they were allowing us to exchange our volunteer tokens for the seats. That was something I had never experienced before so I got a pile of tickets and proceeded to hand them out to volunteers, and even some wonderful people who would not have otherwise seen the
highlight of the festival.

My first concern was my family so I made sure that my wife had tickets for all our kids that could attend. In the past, my wife has not been fond of coming with me because I always arrive late and leave early because of my volunteer driving schedule. This year she brought five of my kids and some family friends as well. A pair of tickets went to her waitress from a new Mexican restaurant in St. Albert (Cerdo, Tacos & Tequila) who was saying that her work schedule would simply not allow her to get her daughter to the festival this year… when Stacey told her about the finale she seemed extremely gracious for the tickets and her daughter ended up loving the show!

I also met a mother of two from Stettler, actually Erskine, but she doesn’t advertise that because she thinks nobody knows where it is (lucky for her I lived there back when I only had three kids). She was a wonderful woman who was staying for the night with a friend in Edmonton and they truly made use of 4 tickets as well. I talked to her daughter after the show while I was waiting to driver performers back to the hotel and her daughter was hamming it up with her Global TV foamy mic and actually acting amazingly professional… that kid has a bright future in TV if she wants.

I ended up driving everyone back to the hotel most of the night, and was home at 3:15am or there abouts. It was raining like crap on my way home and the festival was glad the the lightning held off until the end.

With 2015 in the books and a wonderfully great year, there are two posts left that I want to do, one about the numbers and the future of the event… I definitely see myself getting more involved… and one with the photos we took. Hopefully we will see you all next week with one of both of those!!!