This summer, the Greater Rochester Area is doing a Community Arts project called Benches on Parade.  Years ago they did one with horses that I never thought twice about.  This summer the kids and I are filling a scrapbook with the information about these benches and photos of us with the benches.  It is like a summer scavenger hunt.  We are setting aside time for little excursions to follow our maps and discover the benches, and even parts of the city we have not seen yet.

We headed out in downtown this week while we were there to pick Joey up from work.  The kids have never experienced the amount of hustle and bustle that downtown has to offer at any point, let alone when the evening commute is getting under way!  It was very convenient to have Daddy as the driver who is familiar and comfortable with the nuances of downtown driving and parking!  We were able to find 11 benches within about an hour.  Here they are:

We were very surprised to see these bright yellow benches with the smiles on them in downtown.  According to the website description they were in Highland Park.  It turns out, I think as of June 1st they moved them to other places.  It is our understanding that Kodak sponsored 10 of these in all.  We hope to find them all along the way to celebrate smiles! 🙂

This bench with the headphones is actually the first one I took a picture of with the kids.  As we sat in the truck looking at it Chloe kept insisting the people on it looked familiar to her.  I suggested maybe local news or radio personalities.  She suddenly shouts, “Those are the people from 98PXY!”.  She was right.  Now she is all puffy and proud about it! LOL!  🙂

As I was looking on the website for the benches I noticed that someone had posted a comment stating that they had searched all over the grounds of Hilton High School for this one, but could not find it.  They wondered if it was inside.   We decided to venture over there to see if we could find it.  Joey figured that if we did I could be the first one to post a picture of it on the website.  We found it inside the main entrance to the school.  Kind of an odd spot to have something that they expect many people to be tromping around trying to find it!  So indeed, we were the first to post a photo of this one on the website!

While Chloe was off at Poppy and Gommy’s house preparing for their garage sale, I took the two little ones to the doctor.  Along the way we stopped and took pictures of the next two benches.  Chloe was disappointed because she wanted to see the penguin one.  The sun was in the kids eyes for The Patient Station so they were making strange faces!