Anything with wheels

Over the holidays, we visited the warehouses where volunteers were decorating floats for the Jan. 1 Pasadena Rose Parade.

The floats have to be covered entirely with plant materials. In addition to flowers and leaves, they use poppy seeds, beans, rice, corn, and more. Sometimes they pulverize the material in the blender to get the right color and consistency. We saw one volunteer sorting red cranberries by color: Light, medium, dark.

This volunteer is poking carnations into the painted foam backing on a float, almost a week before the event. Delicate flowers go on last.

It was a really interesting process, and was fascinating to see the intense amount of labor that goes into each float. And interesting to try not to think about how if this much effort went into education, or sharing fulfilling parenting tricks, what a different world it might be.

Anyway, it was a nice family day, and we haven't talked much about it since.

But I guess the day made an impression—this week Starboy built his own floats out of Lego Duplos. A little light in the "natural materials" category, but I guess that's what imagination is for.

He explained that this one has a display area for the decorations.