Giddy Up!

Man I love a good rodeo. The ranch here does an annual employee rodeo for their Fourth of July celebration. All employees and their families are invited for dinner, rodeo festivities, and fireworks. This year they had a bunch of slip n slides and other blow up bouncy house type deals. Dinner was burgers, baked beans, and coleslaw. I sure do love how they do their baked beans. Seriously, I've never liked baked beans before. Yum. And then there were cupcakes and cookies and watermelon for dessert. They even set up a shaved ice machine too.

Charlotte and her bestie Chelsea. 

This was the first day of Chris and Laura's visit with us. I was more than glad to have them eat dinner for free without me having to cook.

Charlotte was a fan of the cookies. 

I love her little patriotic outfit! Thanks Auntie Heidi!

The rodeo stuff that they had was all open invitation. Meaning, anyone that had a horse and wanted to participate was welcome to. They started with a horse race. This year a high school girl won! I guess the bishop has a monopoly on the wins in this race for several years. It was exciting to be there when someone else won.

Everybody having a good time! And we chose a good seat too. The other benches were all in the grass under some trees. Pretty, but not practical. You know, bugs and rain, no fun while you're eating. 

My cute little family. 

I love food. 

Then there were a bunch of things like barrel racing and that kinda thing that you would see at a real rodeo. Michael and Chris got to do the egg toss competition. I think they won. They had taken the biggest steps back and had the largest distance between them when the egg broke. They also had just as many throws as the people that won, but they did it a lot faster. Oh well. We'll always know of their awesomeness.

That's Michael with Jane and Chris with Megan. I'm not sure if they enjoyed this or not. 

Just as the rodeo ended, they started the fireworks. Like immediately. It was impressive, really. All we had to wait for was the amount of time it took us to walk over there. Seriously. It had been raining off and on most of the afternoon and I was pretty surprised that it stopped raining for most of the time that we were there. But as soon as the fireworks ended, it started raining!

Ivan thought the fireworks were really loud, which they were. He was mostly scared by them at first. So I covered his ears and we contently watched the rest of the fireworks like this. He kept saying "ooh!" and "awesome!" while watching.