And now we'll never have to do THAT again...

As a child, the best part of New Year's Day was always the Rose Parade. My brothers and I woke up early, pulled all the blankets off our beds, and spread out on the pulled-out sofa bed to watch. My parents let us lounge in our pajamas all morning until it was over.

As an adult, the Rose Parade still plays a big part of my New Year's Day tradition, though now it's more of the background than the main event. Now I don't watch it so much as turn it on and go about my morning, listening to Bob Eubanks and Stephanie What'shername discuss the floats. (You can tell they're aging because this year Bob kept talking about how he hasn't been on a horse in 2 1/2 years, since he had his hip replaced.) But it's still an integral part of New Year's Day--I remember the year we spent in New York City visiting Scott, and the parade didn't come on until noon because of the time delay. It really threw us all off--Scott, Smed and I were used to watching it when we first woke up, and it just seemed wrong to wait until lunch.

So the parade's always been part of my life, and this week, I decided it should be part of Mark's as well. We don't live all that far from Pasadena, and I thought it would be really cool to go see the floats I've seen crawling across my T.V screen my whole life up close.

Mark was not as enthusiastic. When I told him the plan, he shrugged and said, "I'd rather just relax at home."

To which I replied, "If I stay home today, I'll do laundry, which means you'll be sorting and putting away clothes." He said, "Then, no. Let's go see floats."

Man, I should have listened to him. I didn't really put that much thought into the whole day other than, "Ooooh, floats!" Which means I didn't plan for lunch, or snacks, or long lines, or even cold weather, which all turned out to be the realities confronting us.

I used both the L.A. Times and my GPS to find the floats on display. However, the floats were not where they were supposed to be, and after a couple extra miles, I got nervous. I was about to give up when I hit Pasadena City College, and a sign that said "Float viewing." Perfecto!

We parked in the lot, and headed toward the bus line. It didn't look that long, but some man pointed toward the other side of the parking lot, toward a sign that read "Tickets."

"Start there," he said, pointing toward a much longer line.

Mark took this opportunity to show off his dance moves. First he danced blindly across the asphalt, and right into the line of people waiting for the porta-potties. As you can imagine, that is not the group of people you want to tick off!

But that didn't slow him down. He kept on dancing, and this time almost got run over by a bus. I grabbed him, and pulled a maneuver from the Virginia Dinsdale School of Mothering. I dug my fingers into his arm and dragged him away from there. (I don't have any nails, or I'd have dug them in like dear Mom did!)

And that's how we entered the line, me cursing under my breath, and Mark wailing that I was hurting him. Did I mention it was a loooooong line? It took us about an hour to get to the front of it, during which time Mark alternately kicked the broken pavement, tried to knock down the temporary line dividers and cried some more while I dug my hand into him again as a consequence. At least we put on a good show for the other people waiting in line.

We finally got our tickets, and permission to join the bus line. By then, I'd calmed down, so Mark and I joked and played, wiling away another 30 minutes, during which time I fed Mark all of the snacks I had in my backpack. Besides being hungry, he was also cold--he insists that California means sunny all year long, so he had on shorts and a thin sweatshirt in the 55 degree weather.

Once on board, it was a 10 minute ride to the floats. It was kinda cool to see all the old Pasadena bungalows along the way.

I was so excited by the time we got to the floats! Mark, true to form, was more hungry than excited. We pushed our way through the throngs of people--there were a LOT of people there. I pointed out all the flowers on the first two floats and talked Mark into a few quick photos. The floats weren't as big as I expected, but the flowers were really colorful.





By the fifth float, Mark was losing it. He was hungry, with a capital HUN. Did I mention there were a lot of people there? Because those people weren't just waiting in the tickets and bus lines, or looking at floats--they were also crowding up at the street vendors to buy $6 pretzels. Which Mark refused to eat. Which meant we blew past the remaining floats on the street to find food for him.

We found a mini food park, and while in line (of course), Mark started crying, a sign of him having a low blood sugar. I tested him, and sure enough, he was 59 (anything under 70 is low). As I'm handing him a juice box, the man in our booth starts calling out, "We're out of soup, and corn, and potatoes. [All Mark's choices!] All we have left is fried food."

And that, my friends, is the point in which I removed my Rose (Parade) colored glasses and ended the fantasy. I was shivering, correcting my diabetic son's low blood sugar, waiting to feed him chicken tenders literally dripping oil, being slammed by people cutting through my line. It was at this exact moment I realized why people watch the Rose Parade on T.V. every year--because the real-life experience SUCKS!!!

"We are so out of here," I said, grabbing Mark's hand, and pulling him through the crowd. "Hold onto your food," I told him--his poor sugar-deprived body could not afford to lose even one bite of the (oily) fuel it needed.

And so we left the float display. We got caught in a crowd trying to exit, and I tried to suppress all the claustrophobic feelings rising up. "Take a good look at the floats," I told Mark, as we passed the same 10 floats we'd already seen.


"Why?" he asked. "Because they're so pretty?"

"No," I answered. "Because we are never ever coming back here again. EVER!"

Turns out we spent four times as long in lines as we did actually viewing the floats. But for my money, I didn't care. Some ideas, like watching the parade snuggled up on the couch, are very good ones. And some ideas, like fighting the crowds with a crying child to see the floats in person, are the very opposite of good.

Guess where we'll be watching the parade from next New Year's Day?