My girl scouts got to do the flag ceremony to open the Eagle Mountain Pony Express Days rodeo tonight!
We asked the girls to be there AT 5:00, so, as luck would have it, WE were the ones that were late. However, it wasn’t entirely our fault. Debby came over and I was just finishing getting the kids ready and so I told them to get in the van. The button for the van didn’t unlock the doors…not a good sign. I got the keys and manually unlocked the doors, and while Debby loaded the little kids in the car, I got in and tried to turn it on. The van wouldn’t start. I panicked. It wasn’t even making a sound like it was trying to turn over. It was just dead. So after trying to jump it with Kyle’s car, and trying to jump it with the neighbors car, out of desperation, we split the family in half and half went in Debby’s car and half in Kyle’s car.
The girls did a practice run, and we got to go sit in the stands to watch the pre-show while we waited for the rodeo to start.
We took the girls back down behind the stands to get ready for our turn. I felt like we just stood in the way most of the time because nobody told us where we were supposed to be standing. Amy took Afton back to the box where the microphone is because she was supposed to call out the flags. However, that never happened. The speaker in the box had his own narrative to read and we just had to go with what he was saying. I wish there was some better communication between the rodeo people and our troop so that we would have had a better idea of what to expect. All things considered, the girls did a good job. They didn’t understand the announcers cue for them to walk out of the arena so they stood there a bit longer than they should have but that’s ok, they are cute second, third and fourth graders, so nobody minded.
Next time maybe we will get the girls to all face the audience, instead of looking all over the place.
Then we got to sit back and watch the rest of the rodeo. This is the first rodeo that we have ever taken our kids to, so we weren’t sure just what to expect. But there were guys trying to stay on bucking horses, kids trying to stay on sheep, guys trying to lasso calves and tie them up. There was barrel racing, interestingly, there weren’t any men competing in this; it was mostly women, a couple of teenagers and a couple of younger kids.
The kids seemed to enjoy watching the rodeo, although the girls made several trips to the bathroom (I don’t understand their fascination with porta potties).
Jeremy would make a very cute little cowboy. 🙂
There was also a rodeo ‘clown’. He did some random funny things like sing songs to people in the audience, he hid in a big barrel in the arena while the other guys were riding their horses or chasing the cows. The act that we took pictures of though was when he took two cowboys and laid them on the ground right next to a ramp.
Then he got on his little motorcycle and proceeded to ride up the ramp.
Those poor guys on the ground must have been freaking out. That ramp wasn’t anything more than a folding table, and totally could have broke or fallen over…
To me the scariest part of the rodeo was watching the guys try to stay on the bucking bulls. They didn’t stay on long, and once on the ground those guys had to get up and get out of the way fast. There was one guy that got thrown off and the bull, jumped on him about five times (at least it looked like the bull jumped on him). Thankfully the guy was able to get up and run away and jump onto the fence to get away from the bull.
We stayed to the end. The fireworks at the end of the rodeo really spooked the horses. The horses in the corral behind the arena ran back and forth in the corral as if they were trying to run away from the loud scary bright light, but there was nowhere for them to run.
When we left the rodeo there were officers directing traffic and they directed Kyle towards the city center and they directed Debby and myself toward the highway, so we had to take the long way home. We got home, and unloaded the kids, and I just love seeing them all tuckered out like this:
