Da-dat-dattle-dada-dat-dat-da-da!

My neighbor probably wouldn't like this photo of herself, looking for her husband to arrive at the circus :) She however, isn't on this blog, so she will mind less! She texted me a month or so ago and told me the local homeschool group was heading to the circus--for free!! She added our names to the list and off we went to our huge section. I had no idea there were so many homeschooling families in this neck of the woods--or how many we know! So funny to see the kids greet each other and then mix into various other families that they've gotten to know. By the end of the show, we had kids from four different families in our row and friends from choir (and the church we've started attending every other week :) scattered about nearby. Everybody knows everybody in this business, lol.

The guy in purple (with the cotton candy Mohawk) is a friend from church. His dad directs a ministry to the Deaf, so it was fun to see the kids try to communicate in ASL across a loud and crowded room with him. Obviously he just came over to chat eventually :)

Cotton candy! The boys did their poop patrol early, so had cash in hand to flag down the sellers of such sweet fluff! One of the little guys who sat with us belongs to our friends the K's. His mama sat next to me (with sweet baby D) and said, "Not too many treats for my boy." But my kids couldn't hear over the noise of the circus and so were kindly sharing away down the row. Finally we said, "No more for A!" which Brennen heard as, "Give the whole bag to A!" He was confused, but obeyed and then couldn't figure out why we looked frustrated, lol, poor kid! In the meantime, A's eyes were round as saucers and he was in cotton candy heaven! Our neighbor communicated with B from the row behind (I guess we haven't learned the sign for cotton candy yet ;). B retrieved his treat and A came down to ask his mom if they could "please have cotton candy again this year." She said, "No." Ha! Parenting is so funny sometimes :)

We may have gotten an abbreviated, *practice* version of the circus (I mean, it WAS free :), but this was a treat! When they announced the performing bears, we thought it would be dogs dressed in bear costumes. But nope. REAL bears! The one lady bear in the red tutu looked so embarrassed as she sat in her chair waiting for her turn to perform. By the way, no one was holding her leash! See how close those people are down there on the floor? It was also a show for the special needs community. Can you imagine how frightening it would be to have a bear on the loose? They must be mighty well trained bears! I mean, I guess they can ride bicycles :) Video to follow . . . We thought it was neat that there was a live orchestra in black tuxedos playing the music for all the acts. And the children were appropriately flabbergasted by the inappropriateness of some of the ladies' costumes. The bear gal, well, as my friend Glory said, "She needed to put on her pants!" I don't know though--if I were working with bears that big, I'd want nothing hindering my sprint if anything bear related went south ;)

The elephant show was also impressive! Usually, they just have them walk in a circle, pick people up and stuff, but these three laid down to take a nap, sat down in unison, and one even balanced all four feet on a shiny silver ball with a lady perched on its neck! We also watched tigers jump through flaming circles of fire (that was redundant . . .)

Look--it's like those back massage chains we used to do after volleyball practice :)

When the event concluded, we stopped by the box office to get our next set of entertainment tickets (fee free). One of the performers from the jump roping crew (which was way cooler than it sounds) ran over and gave G$ a high-five. G was stoked!

Like I said before, when we arrived home the old washer and dryer were gone (by the way, I looked up the song the new ones play--it's about trout fishing in Germany :).

Buck and the boys had one more stop to make--Buck picking up the early 40th birthday present he ordered himself at the gun show. Happy guy! Happy me--he's been dropping hints for nearly a year and when his officer buddy got one for Christmas and posted it on facebook, he might have teared up a little . . . hee hee . . . just teasing, honey ;)