circus.

The kids got to experience their first circus a few weeks ago. Lawson started out the evening telling Gretchen how scary clowns are. He's super helpful like that.

We were boring parents and didn't let our kids ride the elephants... or ride the ponies... or buy sparkly wands and light sabers... but we still had a good time.

See all these tigers lined up in a row? They would wheel out one cage at a time and then they all connected together like a tunnel. They would pull out front and back panels and the tigers could just walk through the tunnel to get into the big circus cage. (This will be important to know later...)

Blurry picture, but, um... yeah. That's a tiger, walking around loose in the arena. They were filing back through that tiger tunnel and one of the back panels on a cage didn't get put back into place before they pulled the other one away. So the next tiger just hopped on out.

It was pretty exciting. He walked around the entire arena, then headed out one of the doors to the hallway/concession area. He went 3/4 of the way around the entire building and ended up in a women's restroom. I saw on Facebook that one lady came face to face with him in the restroom. She said it was the scariest and funniest moment of her life! There were some reports about it afterwards that said spectators weren't even aware. Um, no... not even close. We were completely aware of what was happening. Luckily, we could tell when the tiger was caught again, too. 

The magician and his assistant did this changing dresses trick. It was pretty amazing. A lot like this act: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EAKgsNcL4U

Motorcycles scare me to begin with... two of them zipping around in here together was pretty impressive.

The kid balancing on here was maybe 11 years old? That's a round cylinder on the bottom...

I took way too many pictures of these motorcycle guys flying through the air. It was pretty crazy!

The kids still talk about the tiger getting loose... you can watch someone's video of it here: http://youtu.be/5pBo7ofDHss?t=1m44s and Gretchen left saying that clowns are funny and silly. Whew. =)