Hermansen Family Blog: July 2013

With more experience under our belts this year we were a little more prepared to pull off our legendary parade experience! Here are some pics of this years adventure

This was my original concept for the front of the shirt

Here's the concept for our new logo, all I had to do was get the concept pics to Marc and he took care of the rest!

Here is the sweet logo Marc drew up for the back of the shirts

The final design for the front of the shirts, inappropriate and hilarious!

Laura, who has done a tremendous amount of work to get everything ready, picked up the candy from sweets. It turned out to be a bigger task than expected because she got lost and had to call me to get directions to a place that I have never been, thank goodness for Google maps!

The kids standing by the boxes of taffy to show how tall it was

Laura had to pack in almost all of the 34 boxes in the house to protect them from the heat, and when I say "heat" what I mean is that it was hotter than Hell outside that day!

The night before the parade Marc came over and helped us get everything ready for the next day, notice how he is giving me the evil eye!

The candy comes in cases that contain several small bags filled with the taffy, so in order to save time on the morning of the fourth we opened all of the bags and poured the loose candy back in the cases taking special care to not loose a single piece! Our motto was "no candy left behind"

Here I am playing in the empty bags like a pile of leaves while Marc and Laura did all the work

Our next task was to roll up the shirts and rubber band them to accommodate for high speed throwing

Those of you who know me well know that a simple rubber band isn't enough so I made some labels to go along with them. Which seemed like a small job but took way longer than I thought (story of my life)

The morning of the 4th we woke up at 5:30 to a small rainstorm. It is somewhat concerning when you have 900 pounds of perishable candy that people donated money to pay for and it rains the day of the parade!

I had to back the truck in the garage and dry the box out with a fan before filling it with candy. I had to make a bigger box this year to hold the 8 extra cases. I would like to think that my eyes look crazy because of the camera but I'm really not sure I believe that

The empties, as if our house isn't already full of crap!

Making sure each and every piece of taffy is covered and protected with a tarp.....and love

We made it to Moroni safe and sound I made some sweet flagpoles to go in my truck, which made it look flippin sweet!

Patiently waiting for everyone else to arrive

Laura helping Poppy do some stretches to avoid cramping up from throwing candy

Poppy, being overly excited

Sarah, doing her best impersonation of a robot attacking Ella, while the robot was pretend, the attack was very real!

Aiden explaining to Ella how he's going to protect her from the crazed children trying to get to the precious candy supply

Making sure everyone is in their assigned spots

Here is Cynthia showing us a sweet dance she planned of doing during the parade. "Shuffle to the right, shuffle to the left, throw some candy and do it again. Don't forget to smile!!" Unfortunately the small size of my truck bed prevented this from happening

We were able to secure the 24th spot in the line up again, here we are doing some last minute final touches to the truck as we patiently waited for the parade to begin

Andy decided to go in costume this year, which was funny, not only because of the creepy costume but also because it was insanely hot that day

Poppy protecting his hearing with some blue raspberry taffy, when I asked him if he used that flavor because it was his favorite he said no, it's Carols favorite

Shamri, explaining what were going to do; "We're going to take THIS candy and throw it at THOSE people!"

After such a long wait we were finally moving! I had airbags installed on my truck to handle the weight of the candy and all of us

Getting into the action! Everyone loved our float, they couldn't believe how much candy we were throwing. Despite having 55 shirts they sure didn't last long, hopefully we'll see a few people wearing them around!

As we were throwing mass quantities of candy I noticed that we had a stranger on board, it was a photographer from the Salt Lake Tribune, I'll talk about him later

Laura and one of her favorite people in the world Marsha Buttars

Chaz and Zoe doing their best to contain their excitement

Before

After

I'm really not sure what Cheri Buttars is doing here but she seems to be enjoying herself

The kids fighting over the few pieces of candy thrown by the other floats

Our float pulling into sight, and bringing chaos with it

Rusty and Dad giving their approval

It was awesome that Mom, Dad and Rusty came to show their support

You may not know this but Sarah is a very spiritual person, here she is saying a prayer to bless all the candy that it would strengthen and nourish the bodies of those who ate it, and also to bless the people who prepared it, and finally, to ask that everyone travel home in safety

The girls excited to catch more than 2 pieces of candy

Max and the Ry-Guy

Once again when we pulled up to our group we showered them with candy!

FRIENDLY FIRE!

So everyone in the truck decided they wanted to throw candy to our group but after getting hit HARD in the face several times I had to ask the drivers side throwers to stop with the cross fire

Sarah attempted to carry Max up to the video camera

After being hit rather hard by several pieces of candy she decided to retreat

Even in a pic where some one's thumb covers the lens you can still see airborne candy!

Korey and Andy trying to kick the taffy out of the center of the road, preventing any kids from getting ran over by the Spring City Royalty, who are known for running over small children

It looks like Clint Buttars is about to physically remove that photographer

Look at all the candy in the air

Here is a video of the incident, the quality is horrible, mainly because I am clueless when it comes to technology and computer stuff

THE AFTERMATH!

Holy crap that's a lot of candy on the ground!

Come on Emily and Sarah, push those kids down they're stealing your candy!

In spite of all the candy thrown by the time we made it back it was ALL cleaned up, well except for the ones that got ran over in the middle of the street

Here's Dad making sure Ruby has her full bag of candy

We saved a box of candy to throw on our walk back to our group where once again we received much thanks and applaud for our service!

Marc looks terribly angry in this photo, but the truth is that he was moved to tears by the whole experience and this is him trying to mask those tears by biting his lip and looking intimidating!

Shamri was like "MIND.......BLOWN!!!!"

Keyton, apparently this is the only pose he knows how to do based on every other photo he is in

Looks like Rooster got himself a shirt, notice how he is holding it oh so carefully and gently as if though it were a newborn baby

For someone who doesn't let her children eat unhealthy food Emily sure has a LOT of candy there

What a great looking logo!

Here's Rusty proudly showing off his sweet shirt that he got by fighting off three 12 year old girls.

Charly and Zoe showing off their spoils

The girls getting a photo taken with a real teletubby, even though they have no idea what that is

Laura and Sham-Bam chillaxing in the truck after it was all over with

Here I am stumbling in from exhaustion, throwing all that candy and shirts took a toll on my body

Poppy telling Sarah about the most exciting thing of the day, a freaking rad dog he saw while driving in the parade, he even used those exact words

Gotta have a group picture

That photographer just can't stay away, dude! The parade is over, leave us alone!

Laura took the picture just a second before I bared my butt for the camera, too bad

Trying to spend time with Aiden before he decides that I'm not cool

All of the lost candy, it's sad that they will not be enjoyed by any children, they will not be forgotten!

THE SLIGHTLY ANNOYING PHOTOGRAPHER

So back to the news dude. The guy jumps on our truck without even asking, and as you can see from the pics. it was a tight squeeze already. Well I really didn't mind that he tagged along because I figured he would at least mention us in his article.....well he didn't. He made no mention of us whatsoever, he just said that 900 pounds of Sweets taffy was thrown but he didn't say that it was thrown by us alone.

So I guess I am a little irritated that he stole a free ride and ultimately didn't mention us in his article, but the thing that bothers me the most is that he was in the way of our pictures the entire way, and he stood in front of our video cameras several times and even ran into them a few times.

Here are just a few pictures where he was in the way, for your convenience I marked his location with an arrow

After all the excitement we went to Mom and Dads for a delicious barbecue

We got to see Tom and Janice and enjoy some awesome ribs and chicken that my Mom made

Mom playing with Ruby

Later that night we returned to the Beardalls to have some barbecued turkey, which incidentally came at a great cost. When Grammy was attempting to light the grill it had apparently already been turned on so when she lit it there was a small explosion which burned her arm a little and singed her eyebrows and hair.

Ruby sure loves that Shamri!

The girls playing on a slip and slide, well a homemade slip and slide that is.

At the park waiting for the fireworks, we decided to have a thumb wrestling tournament

Ha! I win!

I'm pretty sure Shamri doctored this picture with photoshop to make it look like she beat me, but she didn't

Here's Ashlyn after getting her face professionally painted

A butterfly

We were given a $20 donation to go toward next years candy fund so we decided to take a picture, which, as you will see in the next photos was easier said than done for Shamri!