Loving Life

I am a week behind on my posts! With finals this week, it has been tough to find time to keep all of my ducks in a row. The week before last was a whirl wind! Monday I visited Lowell Elementary for a Horse Tales event (wrote about in previous article, Wednesday was the stick horse rodeo at Parsons Stadium, Thursday was Farm Friends followed by another stick horse race on Friday! I think Rodeo of the Ozarks was represented at most of the children's Ag promotions programs going on in the area.

I was fortunate to perform our Rounders routine with talented girls who have quickly become my great friends! For only having had 2 full practices at a lope, the performance went rather well. After performing we rushed to our station to do face tattoos for some 1700 1st graders. At the stick horse rodeo Springdale students get to spend the day learning about different rodeo events and aspects of western life by going to different stations that have activities such as line dancing, cow milking and calf dummy roping. When mingling with the kids I'd ask them their favorite part of the days events so far and almost every one of them replied that it was "watching the girls ride the horses." That basically made my day!

At Farm Friends is quite similar to the Stick Horse Rodeo but for children of all ages are brought to see different aspects and portions of farm life by looking at interactive stations such as poultry production, learning about horses, rabbits and other animals. I was stationed with Jim House, the farrier. I had just visited with him at Horse Tales as he was teaching the kids about shoeing horses there as well! I had the privilege to tell kids about how and why we shoe horses. They had several sample shoes to look at hold. One boy picked up the biggest one and said "this one weighs 50 feet heavy!" Not long after, a young man walked up to me, put his hands on his hips and said "how many packs is this horse?" Pointing to the horse that Jim was shoeing.  I told him I wasn't quite sure what he was referring too. So he grabbed my hand and pulled me around the front of the horse and points to his chest and asked "You know, how strong is he?" That's when I realized he was assuming that a horse has chest muscles like a person... a 4-pack or 6-pack! It was all I could do not to start laughing but I held it together and explained to him we don't tell a horses strength quite the same way we do a persons. Then there was boy (pictured middle photo on the right) who after I gave him an autograph sheet he started shaking, jumping up down and showing it off! I don't think I've seen anyone get so excited! His reaction was so precious!











Friday was a re run of  Wednesday, getting to be with the Rodeo of the Ozarks Rounders team. Shiloh became the official Rounders Mascot... we decided we're going to get him a shirt made and the whole nine yards! It was another day of face painting. Just when we thought we were finished and picked everything up... another 50  students show up, so without chairs and only a few girls... it was crunch time but no child left without a face tattoo.