Crowd Pleasers

The traveling circus that is my household hit up a local carnival recently. I’d pretend it was hell except it was actually a lot of fun. 

My daughter hung out with a friend instead of us. That’s cool. We didn’t want to be seen with her anyway.

She probably would have been more inclined to hang out with us if I hadn’t given her $20. My husband seemed to think that was a complete Daddy Warbucks move.  Inside his head, it’s 1972 and she shouldn’t have been given more than $2. He seemed confused when I pointed out that one carnival ride costs $3.

The Italian Stallion videotaping his ride with his phone.  Just asking for that phone to fly out of his hands, too, I might add. 

Our son did not have the good fortune of ditching us for a friend. He was stuck sandwiched between us on several rides. We were stuck having our necks thrown out of whack by the crappy shocks on the carnival rides.

But it was fun. I Tilt-A-Whirl’d the hell out of two small children and even the carnie ride operator complimented me on the way out. Either that or he was mackin’ on my fineness. I was wearing my fugly visor though so odds are it was my above average tilting skills. But I’ll take the compliment.

A photo of a pole, my son's hands but no face and some random kid that rode with us.  I gave my husband my phone to take a picture. .  Guess I should have specified that I'd like to be able to see my face in the photo. 

We were well on our way to being done at the carnival and ready for a heavy dose of hand sanitizer but  then my husband spotted our daughter and her friend with a fresh funnel cake in hand. He offered to hold it while they used their last tickets on another ride. And then we got to wait in line to buy another funnel cake to replace theirs.  It mysteriously ended up getting inhaled by two clowns. 

One second the Italian Stallion and his little mini me are conducting a quality control taste test to be sure the funnel cake's not poisoned.  That's standard operating procedure in our house.  But I look away for a second to watch my daughter laughing away on the swinging chairs and next thing I know there's a powered sugar explosion on the front of my husband's shirt and he's asking how much the funnel cakes cost. 

As soon as I got my cell phone out to photograph the sugar explosion, my husband had his little minion brush the sugar off his chest while he brushed off his face.   Too bad grease doesn't brush off as easily.

The most amusing part of the carnival was getting home. My daughter came with her friend but left with us. Except we rode our bikes there. So there were 4 people and 3 bikes. Being the geniuses that we are, we sent the strongest bike rider off into the sunset for reinforcement. Two bikes and one adult stayed with the kids and we started walking towards home.

We didn’t really discuss the plan when the strongest bike rider left but I guess I thought him getting reinforcement was going to mean an SUV we could toss the bikes in. He thought it meant our family sedan. My son hopped right in and left me and his sister for dead with two bikes. One of which was his bike I might add. Chivalry is clearly dead.  I know because my husband and son drove over it leaving two ladies behind to huff it home.

Attempting to win a giant stuffed animal.  I don't even remember what kind of stuffed animal but I don't have any problem remembering we dropped $5 on the attempt.

Two weeks later we hit another little carnival my dad's work was putting on.  We inhaled more high fructose corn syrup and employed plenty of hand sanitizer.  The highlight of that one was the dunk tank. My kids didn’t even know the people inside the dunk tank but that didn't seem to matter. 

It was free and it never lost its humor when the guy fell in.  The line was consistently 10 kids deep.   My trainwreck of a 7 year old was on a role repeatedly going 3 for 3 dunking people. He hit a dry spell later and couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. So naturally, he walked up and just pushed the button. Didn’t even run or try to pretend he wasn’t headed that way. Just sort of strolled up and pushed the button.

That kid’s a crowd pleaser.