If one thing can be said about our daughter, it is that she doesn’t sit still for long. She always has to be doing something. She kept us extremely busy during her school years, starting in elementary school. We were always at school for some performance or event for a club or after school activity she had joined. However, there was one group she was never interested in…choir.  She loved to play musical instruments (she played the viola in string and chamber orchestras her entire middle and high school years), but sing? Nope!

That is, until 5th grade when an announcement went out that they needed a lot of members because the school choir had been selected to sing with the Mass Youth Choir during the National Cherry Blossom Parade. And they would be on TV. Then she joined the choir.

Which meant I had to go to DC and watch the parade.

Even though I am obsessed with the Cherry Blossom Festival and go to DC every year to photograph the blossoms at least once or twice, I was honestly never interested in attending the parade. I am not a parade person in general. I like watching them on TV now and again, but that’s about it. (Except for our daughter’s high school years when she joined the marching band as a color guard member…then I had to go to a lot of parades, but that’s another story).

So anyways, after a long rehearsal up in DC on Friday evening, we had to be back up there very early the next day so she could join the choir on the steps of the National Archives. Thankfully the day was absolutely gorgeous! Since I was the parent of a parade performer, I was able to sit in special grandstand seating and got a pretty good view of both the youth choir and the whole parade.