Veterans Day

We had so much to be thankful for that we had to celebrate Veterans Day two days in a row.

DAY ONE-

Shaw's school does a "donuts for dads" thang each year. They just ask the dads to bring the kids to school one morning and have a donut and a glass of milk compliments of the PTO. I once made the mistake of commenting in a PTO meeting that I wanted to be sure that the value added to community spirit and to the academic and social lives of our kids was equal to or greater than the expense of the event each year. Oops... hit a soft spot with the other attendees of the PTO meeting... I don't mind spending money on anything but I just want my value out of it. This may be the only outward thing to express their love that lots of dads do in a whole year for many of those kids. You can see that it is very well attended.

When you have a Krispy Kreme donut in your hand- that's happiness.

Right after the Donuts for Dads, they have a Veterans Day remembrance for about 20 minutes as school begins with a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and the Preamble. There were a couple of songs by the 6th Grade Choir and some thank-yous to the veterans in attendance.I ran into one of my past instructors from University of Phoenix- a veteran. I shook his hand and thanked him for the class and then I shook his hand again and thanked him for his service to our nation. I was so enjoying chatting with him that I lost my presence of mind to have Lesa snap a photo of us.

DAY TWO-

I had a customer in my office at 9AM on Veterans Day proper and right after that, we went to the local parade in downtown Mesa.

Here's Shaw out at the edge of the street looking at the military hardware.

Several antique cars on parade. It seems that the Mesa Historical Society has about 12 cars in a collection.

A fly-by of some historic planes from WWI and WWII.

A Viet Nam era helicopter that got Shaw all excited.

How can you not respect and admire men and women who not only wear all of this gear but the uniform of the nation that they defend and represent? They do what they do in OUR name. God Bless America!

It was a great parade and the perfect day for it. Overall a bit too long with a bunch of unknown local politicians, local celebrities I've never heard of and a few winning contestants of obscure beauty pageants. It was balanced with lots of Scout Troops, all of the local high school marching bands and a couple of jr high bands and several veterans organizations.

I got a bit miffed by a few shameless commercial interests, like auto dealerships and such, that only displayed a flag or an aforementioned pageant winner and called it a parade entry when it was really an advertisement for goods and services. It just didn't seem the place for it.

The middle of the parade was a collection of photographs of recently fallen servicemen and women from Arizona. We stood with hands on our hearts and I crrrrried like a weeeeeee bay bee! I didn't get any photos of that because I had too much reverence for the moment.