The Annual Faire Visit and Pork Chop On A Stick

Like the crazy fools we are, we made the long trek out to Casa de Fruta today to visit the Northern California Renaissance Faire today. Admittedly, it's probably a little foolish to drive for two hours each way only to spend four hours or so wandering around a dusty Elizabethan village, but it's a Tradition with a capital T now for us--missing a year would feel almost blasphemous (according to the religion of nostalgia). Besides, we really wanted to take Eli, (we knew Isaac would neither particularly care nor remember it yet), both because we knew he'd really like it this year (our son who is so into knights and dragons and pirates and wizards), and because we want to inculcate the Tradition into him while he's still too young to know better.

We had a pretty good time overall--the weather was actually somewhat cool, and we got to see some old friends, albeit briefly since they were all distracted with, well, working, and we were distracted with kids. We had our necklaces restrung, and bought a bunch of random tchotchkes for both ourselves (I finally shelled out for one of those huge over the top velvet and ostrich feather pirate hats I've always coveted) and for Eli (he wanted to buy practically everything there, especially in the pirate booth). We played pistol-bows (which Eli remembered fondly from last year) and "dunk the raucous peasant in the water tank", and we got to eat our traditional Faire foods (turkey leg, baked potato, fruit ice, etc).

It was actually while we were getting our food that the most notable event of the day happened: Eli pointed at a sign on one of the booths and said to us, all proud of himself, "that says 'Pork Chop on a Stick.'" We both practically did double-takes--he had just read a pretty elaborate sentence! We were blown away. We asked him how he knew that, sure that it was some sort of half-guess on his part, he couldn't have really read that whole thing, could he? But sure enough, our boy's first "I can read" moment was "Pork Chop on a Stick." I'm so proud and excited that he's really reading…and so amused that it happened at Faire and with that particular phrase. I think this one is going down in Eli history along with the infamous "please do not staple Boba Fett in the head".