It's a festival, it's for kids, it's in Marrickville!

It's Marrickville Children's Festival. We arrived at the festival at 10.45am just after the starting time of 10.30am. It was only just getting into gear... O and Dad went to check out the dragon dancing welcome and welcome to country. J and I cruised around a few stalls selling wares - one of the more interesting ones selling wooden planes and other wooden wares all made by youth at risk programmes.

The activities were dotted the entire school grounds and O and Dad were soon off and away. O had fun sitting in the drivers seat of both a police car and fire engine and using the fire truck hose pipe. Then the music got going - we missed the Earthbeats performance which we had really wanted to check out, but made it to see the Gamelan orchestra - which O loved! With the orchestra all seated on the floor - he was able to get up close, a little too close and he grabbed the mic! Then he was off to the hip hop workshop - and enjoyed it so much he missed the Electric Lunchbox performance he had been waiting for. Clearly too young (at just over two years old) for the hip hop workshop...he sat on stage and splayed legs on the floor with his eyes fixated on the workshop leader.

There was a garden tea party, delightfully arranged in amongst the grassy schoolyard inclines and while we did not have a sit down tea - I grabbed some yummy treats which we ate after our sausage sizzle.

There were the usual faves - jumping castle and face painting. A very thoughtful chillout area for the under fives with play dough tables and gym equipment.

My only suggestion would be there were perhaps too many key performances on at the same time, which spread the audience a little thin across what was going on... for example Electric Lunchbox were on at the same time as the hip hop workshop.

We left just after midday, while the festival continued well into the afternoon with loads more...