Several months ago Jackson decided that for his 17th birthday he wanted to go to the Hatsune Miku concert in Dallas. We kept the kids out of school on Thursday and headed to Dallas. Luckily our oldest daughter loves to go to concerts and happens to live in Dallas so she was escorting Jackson and Hannah to the concert in Deep Ellum.

Of course, we had the obligatory stop.

Since it was Jackson’s birthday (well, the next day was his actual birthday) he got to choose where he wanted to have dinner before the concert. He wanted to try Jollibee. We had never heard of it, but it was on the way, so that made it easy. He actually asked me to take his picture with the bee.

Here’s the whole gang.

Jake and Phoebe headed back to their house and Donny and I dropped Nikki and the kids off at The Factory in Deep Ellum. The doors opened at 7 with the concert starting at 8. We got there at 6 and the line was wrapped around the building. Deep Ellum has gotten a lot sketchier since I used to go to concerts there back in the day. I’m so glad we decided to have Nikki go with them. The concert is not your typical concert. It’s an anime hologram with an actual live band, but the hologram does the singing. Jackson was right when he said, “Mom, you will not like going to this concert”.

Donny and I decided to hang out in the West End. It’s not far The Factory, but a safer more walker friendly area. We decided to get a drink and some chips and salsa at RJ’s mexican restaurant. This was the HOTTEST salsa. Donny loves super spicy food and even this was almost too hot for him.

The weather was nice, even though it was a bit muggy. There was the world championship high school robotics competition going on so we got to people watch. It was funny seeing people from other countries coming out of the western shop next door with cowboy hat boxes.

We had a few hours to kill so we decided to go shop around the western shop

I really wanted this Tshirt, but they didn’t have it in my size

We found this park that was just in the middle of all the buildings. There were swings that seemed just right to sit a spell.

As it got dark we heard live music and ended up at Jack Ruby’s. The guy playing was really good and I was able to drink about 4 glasses of ice water to try to cool off my digestive track from that salsa we had earlier.

There were only a handful of people there, but we had a lot of fun singing along to the music and chatting with the bartender and other customers.

Finally it was time to go pick up the crew. It’s so strange being in a big city with super tall buildings. I think our tallest one is 7 stories.

Anyway, Jackson had a great birthday. They all had fun at the concert even though there were only 100 light sticks (bad planning on the company that puts these shows on) so they didn’t get one. But they did get a concert Tshirt and they were really happy with that.