The Carson and Barnes circus, that is. Barnum and Bailey it isn’t — but to me, that’s a good thing.

I was never really crazy about circuses. It may be because I still remember going to a Shriner’s circus when I was little, and seeing a man fall off the high-wire. It wasn’t part of the show; he really got hurt and had to be taken out on a stretcher, to an ambulance. I also get stressed out by the whole “three ring” thing: there’s SO much going on, and I don’t want to miss any of it, but at a B&B circus, you don’t have any choice! They have all three rings going, with different things, all the time — there’s no way to see it all without coming back and sitting in another section!

The Carson and Barnes circus was better in that respect: they had three rings alright, but when they had all three going, it was the same thing in both of the side rings, and something fairly similar in the center ring. And most of the time, they only worked one ring at a time. That’s my kind of circus!

And the prices were very reasonable — much better than you-know-who: we only paid $26 for ALL of us to get in, then spent another $4 for a pony ride for Angelina (Alexander didn’t want to go), and then $11 more for two snow cones, a bag of cotton candy, and two coloring books! We waited a really long time in line to buy our tickets — over 30 minutes! — and missed the very beginning of the circus because of it, but were VERY lucky: they sold the last general admission tickets to the person two people ahead of us, and we got the VERY last preferred seats — the last available seats for the 1:30 show!

The kids really had a good time, but I think Christina enjoyed it more than anyone. I fully expected her to fall asleep at some point, since her morning nap was cut short, and this was going to run straight through her afternoon nap time, but she was having MUCH too much fun to sleep! She kept twisting around, staring and pointing at everything, saying “da! da!” Then, she’d bounce up and down on my lap and clap; it was really cute.

Lessons we learned for next year:

-wear shorts! or at least wear short-sleeved shirts! (we had no idea how warm it was going to get today, and the kids and I were dressed much too warmly.)

-bring cash! Yes, they accept credit cards, but the line is ungodly slow, and they ONLY accept them at the gate. If you want to use a credit card for snacks, drinks, and souvenirs, you have to use it to buy circus cash, and then use THAT to buy the rest. (But they don’t tell you this when you buy your ticket; we found out from the nice lady sitting next to us, thank goodness!)

Pics are here.  (Still more to upload, but there are some there now.)