My day in hell and other interesting bits

You know, I really try to give Dylan all kinds of fun experiences. Sometimes that ends in massive amounts of joy and laughter like his trip to the Children's Museum with Kolby earlier this week and sometimes it ends in thoughts of suicide like our trip with the Turners to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. I thought I was being clever going during the week when the chaos would be minimal and the trip would be gumdrops and happiness. Wrong.

First of all, let's talk about the millions of field trippers. Every school district in the city appears to reserve their one field trip for this event which frankly is a waste. The exhibit for kids involves watching a cow be miked, an astroturf covered slanted surface intended to be a "hill" for kids to "roll down" (aka get astro burn on their elbows and then land either into a crowd of boot covered feet or at the above mentioned cow milking), lines of smelly animals that aren't intended to be touched and then finally the sales area of Chevy pickups and John Deere tractors. Maybe next year they could actually go somewhere where they could learn something other than the sticker price of a tractor? So as you walk, you are bombarded by these endless lines of children in the same color shirt. They are all over the place, covering the surface of the Reliant Arena like ants on an ant hill that just had the shizz kicked out of it. Wanted them all to just go away, though I was run up and hugged by one who turned out to be MIL's neighbor. I liked that.

So far I've pointed out that the place sucked and that the kids sucked but one kid in particular mega sucked -- Dylan. He wasn't in the mood to be told what to do and where to go, he wasn't in the mood to hang out in crowds and he wasn't in the mood to pretend to like the rodeo. So he cried a lot outloud and I cried a lot inside. He pet two cows and was tickled by that, enjoyed sitting on every foot massager in the place, loved sitting on all the tractors, and wanted the person dressed as a cow to adopt him and take him home and every second in between was pure hell. Here are some pics, but to top the experience off, the lighting sucks so bad in there that every pic sucks too.









Someone please email me a link to this post next year when I consider going to the rodeo again, k?