Rodeo

We went to a rodeo in Ogden with my parents and Jillian and Brady on the 24th of February. It was a lot of fun. My favorite part about it was watching how excited Lydia got watching everything. When we got there the first thing she did was climb right up onto the rail so she could watch the horses. My parents got there right when the doors opened because they knew Lydia would like to have a front row seat.This is all of us waiting for the rodeo to start!Lydia got to have a corn dog for dinner and she loved the fact that I didn't cut it into little pieces for her to eat.Brooke only got to have an unopened Dr. Pepper.Doesn't Brooke look so cute in the hat? I think it makes her look little.
Lydia was so excited when the horses came out for the first event. She clapped and cheered just like everyone else. She kept saying, "jumpy jumpy jump" because the horses and the bulls were bucking and she thought they looked like they were jumping.The weirdest thing happened at this rodeo and I can't help but feel extremely blessed by the outcome. Lydia sat on my dad's lap or stood right in front of him for almost the entire rodeo. The only event that she didn't stay by him was the barrel races and she went and sat on my mom's lap. When one of the riders was going around the first barrel, the horse threw its shoe and it went flying (at a significant speed) and hit my dad on the jaw. The horse shoe had come from between the bars, hit my dad in the chin, bounced off him and hit his Xoom (which he brought in case Lydia got bored and wanted to watch Dumbo), bounced off the Xoom and hit the pole in front of him, and then bounced back and hit him in the chest and the horse shoe landed in his pocket. We all heard the horse shoe hit the bar and didn't think too much of it because often times dirt flies up and hits the bars, but when we looked at my dad he was just sitting there with a stunned look on his face and then we saw the horse shoe and realized he had been hit in the face. He said that he saw it coming and thought of one softball game where a foul ball was coming to him and he just ducked and fell to his butt so he wouldn't get hit. He said he kept trying to just fall to the ground but wasn't going anywhere since he was sitting. He ended up being okay and it just looks like a cut on his face. The scary part is that if Lydia would have been where she was the entire rodeo the horse shoe would have hit her and I am certain it would have done a lot more damage to her then what it did to my dad. My dad was blessed that it didn't hit him anywhere else either because it could have and quite possibly should have done more damage to him too. I will forever consider that particular horse shoe the luckiest horse shoe ever. I can't even think of what might have happened if Lydia didn't move right when she did. We had tried all during the rodeo to have her come to someone else, but she only wanted to be sitting by my dad and for some reason, she decided to sit by my mom. I also think that if my dad wouldn't have had his Xoom out when he did that it would have ended up hitting Lydia after it hit my dad and still might have hurt her quite a bit too. I am certain that my little family was being watched over and we were extremely blessed.

The paramedics came and checked my dad and gave him an ice pack (that never got cold) and told him to keep it on his jaw. Lydia was so worried about grandpa and his "ow" and whenever he took the ice pack off she made him put it back on his face.