MLK Parade

This was the street in Dallas that the parade went down. It ended at Fair Park. This is the second largest parade of it's kind in the nation for the past 23 years.

Munching on apples, trying to survive the bitter cold!

Before about 150 more people lined the street behind them.

You can see how cold it is by our faces!

We were not prepared for it to be that cold and only wore

fleece jackets instead of our big winter ones. Brrr...

These were no Flower Mound marching bands! These highschool kids had some serious moves! I have never seen tuba players dance that low to the ground before!

All the bands played and danced at the same time, it was very entertaining.

As expected, much of the parade was focused on Obama.

The museum of natural history had this gorgeous elephant statue.

Happy Birthday, Dr. King!

This event had a lot of meaning for me this year as Isaac is starting to understand skin differences. The other day he was laying on the floor looking at his class photo and he said, "Mom, I am the only brown skinned kid and all the other kids are light. When you adopted me, you painted me brown but you were supposed to paint me light like you!" All the reading I've done telling me that transracially adopted kids go through this did not prepare me for looking into my own little one's brown eyes as he genuinly felt sad about being different. I explained that in his class is an asian girl and a girl with really blonde-white hair and a very small boy with severe food allergies. Doesn't he think they feel different from everyone else too? And that God makes every person unique from everyone else. But that all being said, I still worry for my little guy and his sense of self in this world as he grows up. In this particular class picture he is SO dark you can hardly make out his facial features- darn indoor lighting! It is our desire that his elementary school be more racially diverse than his preschools have been, and of course we hope to welcome more children into our family that share his skin color.

After the parade we went to the local McDonalds where he played with about 20 other black children of all ages. We were literally the only white people in the place the whole time we were there. He ran and laughed like he does with any kid anywhere, I don't even know if he noticed. But it made this Mama's heart very happy to see a rare moment where my boy just blended in.

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Here is the old blog post where I write about MLK Jr.

January 2007