Earning our Family Badge: Air Show

For as long as Augie is old, he has been infatuated with things in the sky. His primary love has always been the moon. He's pretty impressed with the sun lately too, but he gets quite excited when he sees things moving in his beloved sky. It began with birds, and has since evolved into airplanes and helicopters. He'll actually stop what's he doing and run to a clearing in hopes of catching a glimpse of the airplane he hears soaring above.
So naturally, Kevin thought it would be fun to take him to an air show. Kevin's one trip as a small child resonated with him, so he planned the family outing. I on the other hand had never been to such an event, but thought the idea of 'people watching' would make for a fun afternoon. So once some plans for a jaunt to the hill county fell through, we took advantage of a pretty day, and drove down to the show. Oh and when Kevin agreed to my one stipulation of stopping at the outlets on the way home, I couldn't get my camera battery charged fast enough.
After a long, circuitous jaunt to the air base, we were finally directed to the vast grassy parking lot. By this point, August was more than tired of being strapped in his car seat, and as soon as I saw the lines of people waiting for buses, I was a little less than gung-ho myself. But once August spotted the big buses he cheered right up, so I gave myself a pep talk, and off we went.
The show was set up with scary, gigantic, oversized, planes at the front, and gradually worked down in size to the helicopters and smaller little flying things. At the end of the flying craft parking lot, was the runway 'stage'. So we walked our way past all of the aircraft, and the people seeking shade under their wings, to the runway just in time to see the Blue Angels take off to do their crazy, acrobatic thing. What we didn't anticipate was that all of those loud planes spinning and circling above would be a little too overwhelming for our little guy. He latched on to us with a death grip, and was pretty ready to get out of there. So we snapped a few more photos, and made our way back through all of the displays, to the big white buses. It was about a 45 minute visit, round trip, which I think was just the perfect amount of time for our introduction to the world of air shows. And perhaps he's more of a boat and trailer show kind of kid right now.

Did I mention they were playing the soundtrack to Top Gun over the loud speakers? And I may have actually heard someone use the phrase 'hot damn'... Couldn't have said it better myself.