Homecoming!

It's a BIG day in our small town -- HOMECOMING! GO BULLDOGS!!

First, for those of you've who have never visited, we live in SMALL town. How small? Well, our town does not have one stop light. Yep, that's right. Not one single stop light. We do have a pizza parlor, a cafe, a take-out Chinese food restaurant, a grocery store, a Dollar General, a funeral home, a roller skating rink, a swimming pool, two gas stations and a children's clothing store. And a few other even smaller businesses. Plus, we have our own post office, a fire station, police station (with four squad cars!) and quite a few churches.

Our town actually is more of an off-shoot of the larger town close to us when sprawl spawned a large housing development that happened to be in the city limits of our small town. These newer houses led to more tax income for the city which was used to improve the schools. Better schools made even more people want to build homes here and the cycle continues. More students led to Sarah's new junior high which just opened this year and a new high school just a few years ago.

So today is Homecoming and Spirit Day! Kids have a shortened school day so they can watch the Homecoming parade snake its way through town and then the big game this weekend. There also is a chili feed at the high school tonight plus lots of other fun activities.

Last year Sarah had just arrived in the US when Homecoming hit. We tried to explain to her what a parade was but she had no context to understand it. Kevin and I both went to school early that day to try to find her in the crowds in case she was nervous or not sure what to do with fire trucks full of football players throwing candy at the kids lining the streets and the band jumping up and down as they marched. We found her with the ESL teacher nervously taking in all the action. She had a piece of candy in her hand that had been thrown off one of the floats and she looked at us like, "What the #$=!"

This year she's SPIRIT ready and excited! She picked out a new Bulldog shirt and has "Go Team!", dog footprints and red ribbons for her hair. And, don't forget the glittery make-up. What would Spirit Day be without that!!!