Ringling Bros/Barnum & Bailey Circus

The names Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey bring back a lot of memories.  They used to be two separate companies and every time one of them came to town my Dad would take us.  He always managed to talk to someone at the BIG TENT door and soon he would look over at us and wave us on in.  I never knew what he would say to them but he always got us in for free.  I think he was a carnie at heart himself.

This was an amazing circus, it was non-stop the whole 2 1/2 hours except during the intermission.

When Amber finds any kind of glow sticks for a dollar she buys them for the kids for these kinds of events.  It’s a lot cheaper than buying all the stuff they stick in the kids face to buy.

The circus used a lot of Segway's for all kinds of creatures, they were pretty fascinating.

The women hanging on the bars were getting ready to drop down on one of the horses running around the ring.

 

This man was riding a motorcycle back and forth  on a high wire with two women doing tricks on bars below him.  They were almost over our heads.  At one point they flipped upside down in a circle. 

 

Here Davis is sitting in a seat, but most of the time I held him on my lap so he could see.

You can’t have a circus without the elephants.

This is a steel ball where they start out with 4 motorcycles inside and work their way up to 8 motorcycles going around all at the same time.   It’s amazing to think of the timing they have to have.

   

Here they have 4 on top and 4 on the bottom starting out and then they all start going every which way.

The theme was “Do You Have the Dragon in You?” And, of course, this is the dragon that finally appears close to the end of the circus.

It was quite an adventure!

First Snow

We had our first snow last night and it was so beautiful and peaceful to watch from my window

Signs of New Life

I potted about a dozen pots of hyacinths, tulips and daffodils in the Fall. These hyacinths are the first to come up.

It’s refreshing after Christmas to begin to see the Spring flowers showing up.

This is my experimental/rescue project. A year ago August I was at the Lowe’s garden center and they had about a dozen dwarf Mandarin orange trees that were only a stick in a pot for a $1. But I thought why not I’ll buy two of them and see what happens. This one is doing great, but the other one was in a pot that didn’t drain well so I’m having to nurse it along now in a different pot. I’m anxious to taste these when they’re ripe.

We’ve had really nice weather here in January and it’s giving us all Spring fever. I wish it would stay this way all the way to Summer, but I think that’s wishful thinking.

Miscellaneous Christmas shots

Still finding pictures from December that I had forgotten about but I wanted to send along.

We are waiting on Lexington’s Main Street for the Christmas Parade to begin.  There was a light rain but not enough to deter anyone from wanting to see the parade.  It was fun, just a real downhome type Christmas parade.  Of course we had to get ice creams from the ice cream shop.

Amber bought a lot of these type of Christmas crafts last year after Christmas, and so did Chris, for the kids to put together.  Some of them the kids got in their Advent Calendar and others were treats.  They loved them and did really well putting them together.

This is the kid’s Dollar Tree Christmas town.  They got all the pieces for a dollar each, they were so cute. 

A boy making a snowman and a snow angel, children helping Santa decorate a tree, kids skating on a pond, a horse drawn carriage, various houses and trees.

The kids received some Target gift cards for Christmas so Amber used some of them to organize their toys.   Oh how nice it is to have a place for everything and to be able to put the ones up high that they need supervision with.

Abby went to a friends birthday party where everything was airplanes.  This was a treat made to look like a plane propeller.