If you don’t have expendable income pouring from every orifice, do not take your children to the summer festival. With four adults, four children and one baby between our two families, we spent close to $200 in ONE hour. That’s $80 on wristbands, $20 on letting each kid play ONE game, $20 on elephant ears and ice cream, and half a year’s salary on “dinner” that we mamas inhaled in four minutes because the kids were trying to Houdini their way to the rides and almost-certain stranger danger, while our husbands took an exorbitant amount of time buying Philly cheese steak sandwiches. That they complained about. Between the five offspring, approximately 18 noodles and the cheese off of one slice of pizza were consumed… yet we all somehow got diarrhea the next day.
If your kids do not have the dexterity and sense of balance to lick an insanely tall ice cream cone, do not take your children to the summer festival. The ice cream will slide off of the cone and the only thing louder than the sad splat it makes on the overgrown grass will be the guttural anguish tearing loose from your child’s soul. If you’re really lucky, the ice cream stand dude will replace the ice cream, so that your kid can experience this roller coaster of emotion a second time. Or third, as was the case with us this year!
If you have a tween, do not take your children to the summer festival. Actually, just don’t take tweens anywhere for like several years. They are dicks.
If you nodded yes to any of these circumstances, you should probably avoid the summer festival. Or go! You'll feel good about yourself for giving your children this beautiful, magical summer memory. And, you'll have one over them when they get destroyed by the truth when their day comes.