Governor's Picnic

As promised the end of July ended up being pretty crazy busy for us. All that craziness kicked off with what is sure to go down in history as the most famous Governor's picnic ever. Our lovely Sarah, being the International celebrity she now is draws quite a crowd these days, so of course, we adjusted our shopping list and planned for a couple extra thousand people this year. Then came her announcement that July 25th (the day of the picnic) would be her full last official day in office. You can only imagine what that did for the crowds, security and media-it was barely short of a three ring circus. Our original estimate was up from our usual 6500 people to 8000 and then bumped up to 10000 after word of her resignation stoked the proverbial fires and in the end it sounds like estimates put us at an attending crowd around 12000 including one whole cruise ship up from the lower 48 specifically for the Picnic. Like I said...crazy.

We had rain the few day heading in to the weekend, so as usual we upped our prayer efforts on the weather front. Faithful as always, God provided and picnic day dawned with what couldn't exactly be described as sunny skies, but they were are least dry skies. Half and hour before the picnic we had hundreds of people already in the foods lines and hundreds more milling about waiting for the festivities to start and I had no petting zoo, not crazy hair artists, facepainters, but no facepaint, no inflatable jumping structure, but at the noon-hour kick off everyone was in place (including the livestock) and the kids were enjoying full throttle fun. I'd have to say that kid-wise it was our best offering in the three years I've been doing the picnic. Hooray for pony rides!
There was surprisingly little anti-Sarah demonstration and all in all it turned out to be an amazingly seemless, crisis free day-what more can you ask for with 12000 people and Alaska's most famous celebrity?! The girls got to play with Piper a bit-Ella LOVED her and I got to take Piper to get her hair done by my hairdresser, Normandy, which was a huge hit for little Piper. Sometimes, kids (even famous kids) just gotta be kids, you know? I got a big hug (along with an invite to move to the Valley) from Sarah, along with a compliment that I looked "amazing" and I finally got a "skinny" picture with Sarah-to replace all those pre-Ella hefty ones! I'm signed up to help handle some of the insane onslaught of mail she's getting and so far that's been pretty entertaining. I'm not sure where she's going from here, or if SHE even knows, but I've been a Sarah girl from the beginning-before the cover of TIME and Runners World, before MSNBC, CNN and FOXNews pronounced her last name right, before she won the Gubenatorial election, before she won the Primary, before every woman in the Nation was wearing Sarah glasses and the Sarah updo and I intend to be a Sarah girl to the end, whatever that is.