Life experiences are learned in some of the most unexpected times and by the unsuspected. This last week was our families first time going to a cattle show. The four of us loaded up with what felt like more kid and food supplies than cattle supplies, that blog edition will be saved for next time. 😁 Both Buddy and Hay were super excited to go to the cattle show and try to win a ribbon with their heifer.
Show day was one of the more chaotic days! Ramsey and I judged the Limousin show at 8, Ramsey was going to help a family fit their Simmentals for their show at 10:30 and the Red Angus show was at 2. I know for a fact that if we did not have the great friends that we do, this day would not have been able to be completed. By the time we needed to start fitting our Red the kids were really getting into being apart of it. Hailey wanted to hold Daddie's clippers and Daniel wanted to comb the legs up. Life was great! Then, Daniel decided he wanted to show the heifer. If I knew the heifer was going to act perfectly fine I would have let him. However, it was her first time to the show and an event like this needed to be a positive first experience for both of them. By the time we were headed to the show ring I decided it was going to be too much to get two kids and one heifer up to the ring. Luckily, our Simmental Mom was able to take the kids and go look at other activities taking place at the fair.
Being the competitive family that we are, Ramsey and I were pretty disappointed when we didn't get a piece of the division. However, if you don't want to get beat then you better not go to the show. Once the heifer was done showing and the kids got back to the stall, Daniel came up to me and asked if we were going to get to show her again. I told him that we were done for the day and we didn't do good enough to go back in for champion drive. He looked at me a little confused and paused for about 5 seconds. He then said, "Well, can we go to another show and try again?" With a huge smile on my face I said, "Yes we absolutely can!" Without any hesitation he jumped out of his chair and said, " OK, let's go wash then."
It took me back for a second because I was truly expecting the conversation to take a downward turn when he found out he wasn't going to get to show his heifer that day. Instead it reminded me of an important lesson. No matter how your days go the one thing you can always do is go wash it out and start over tomorrow. When we are going through life we can sometimes get so wrapped up in what we didn't get done or what we should have done differently that we forget to look for the good stuff taking place now. Thank you Buddy for reminding me of this at fair.
