Australian Celtic Festival 2008

We've had a brilliant day. Mr Y was out of the house at 5.30am to attend the Dawn Service at the Australian Standing Stones -

http://www.australianstandingstones.com/

Each year the focus is on a different Celtic group. Mr Y is the only person who has a Breton (Brittany) kilt so two years he read the Lord's Prayer in Breton (researched on the internet) at the Dawn Service.

There's a Parade on the Saturday morning - Mr Y and Littlemiss did their bit for Bretagne (see left).

When the kilt was made up properly, the makers also returned every scrap they didn't use. I used a particularly long scrap to make the sash for Littlemiss.

During the day I saw several good celtic/folksy bands, and hope to go back and do some more sitting about listening tomorrow. Today Mr Y spent a couple of hours on carpark marshalling duty as a volunteer and I chased the kids around. He doesn't know it yet, but tomorrow the plan is for him to do the kid-wrangling ;-) while I volunteer to sit and soak up some live music.

The local Uniting Church set up a kids' activities stand, and my pair loved it. They each made a coracle - although Littlemiss's "helper" did more of the work than she did, to be fair. Littlefella rejected all help and far too much advice - his work is his own, but he didn't get as good a result.

As well as the coracles, they could make a pet rock (good ballast for the coracle!), do some celtic colouring in, get celtic symbols painted on their faces, and make a celtic rope knot.

The American Irish soldier types, who were there to prove (I think) that the celts ended up all over the world, did some interesting manouevres in the middle of the Standing Stones, finishing with a couple of rounds of firing their rifles - just gunpowder for the noise. Then the grand finale was a single firing of their old cannon. We were advised to block one ear - so I did. Littlefella blocked both ears. Littlemiss blocked both ears, closed her eyes and snuggled into me. Mr Y was walking up from the carpark, didn't hear the warning, didn't block any ears and has been shouting at us all evening. Poor man was deaf enough already!

Having made a tidy sum selling old toys at our garage sale last weekend, Littlefella was quite upset to find that the weapons and armour stall that he ogled last year, wasn't there this year. He calmed down after a while and decided to just enjoy himself. While Littlemiss was off watching the sheepdog trials (she loves kelpies because her dad has one - of course), Littlefella spent some time watching the tossing of the caber in the Strong Man contest.

Then the "Romans" came out in character as gladiators and did some impressive fake fighting. Their MC was excellent, really got the crowd involved.

When we were having a more thorough look at all of the stalls at the festival, Littlefella found some weaponry that has been designed for youngsters just like him. He didn't have quite enough money on him to pay for his new sword in full, but he has a fat bank account so I loaned him the extra temporarily. The new sword was violently expensive for what I thought was a lump of plastic, but it turns out that it has a fibreglass core and is made for kids aged 7 and over who wanna play soldiers/fighting without hurting each other, and without having cheap fake weapons break all the time. The Feral Teenager went through a similar weapons obsession and seems to have come out relatively unscarred (although he's in cadets now, so maybe the obsession is merely momentarily latent, waiting to be activated by an army career *sigh!*), so here's hoping Littlefella will too.