Missed Meat Puppets and Caterpillar Butts

Summer is certainly fest season, as Chicagoans race outside to soak up as much sun as possible, before we have to hibernate again. This past weekend, we hit the dual and adjoining Kids Fest and West Fest.

The 3rd annual Kids Fest was not crowded and the kids were able to moon bounce and play on an inflatable obstacle course as long as they wanted to stay in. They also got to emerge repeatedly from a giant, inflatable caterpillar's butt, with minimal wait times.

There were plenty of free carnival games, musical entertainment, and high flipping hijinks with The Jesse White Tumblers.

We even ran into a friend of ours, Jeff Parker, guitar player for the band Tortoise and numerous other musical endeavors. He was hanging out with his daughter, who is in first grade. She spent a year of preschool in class with Sagezilla and a year with Du-Jay, in different schools.

We brought home live, growing bean seed necklaces at The Garfield Conservatory booth, made cat tails with Brookfield Zoo and animal masks with Bubbles Academy. Face painting was available, and after the initial $2 per child entry fee, most activities were free.

We declined the extra charges for pony rides and rock climbing wall, but each of our kids made $1.50 worth of slime with Mad Science. Earlier in the year we saw Mad Science at Midsommerfest and made our own superballs. The slime provided hours of fun as fake snot, slippery high fives, and general gloppy good times.

Our big plan was to stay for The Meat Puppets, but their 8:30 start time on a school night proved to be too ambitious. So we took the kids home earlier and Googled old Meat Puppets music videos for the kids to round out their school of rock educations.