Buttered corn and muddy runs

My Grandma lives in a small town close to our house.  With all the busyness of summer we had not stopped in to see her yet.  The town was doing their annual buttered corn festival and it felt like a good time to drop in and pay Grandma a visit.

The festival was so unbelievably cute.  There were expensive rides (which we did not do), free kids games by the FFA (which we did), free buttered corn and polka music played by a band of accordion players.

We met my parents there and while the kids and I drank pop and ate free buttered corn until our sides ached we talked to two older men who sat down to eat their buttered corn next to us.  One of the men asked me if I knew where to get an accordion fixed in the town I live in....alas, I told him, I have not looked into that one yet!   The other man (age 80 I guess) told me all about when he "courted" his wife who lived about a mile from where we live.  When he said "courted" I just started smiling right there....there is just something special about the way things were done when people said "courting".

A newspaper man came and snapped a few pictures of my boys with their mouths and hands full of corn.  And off we went to listen to the polka music.  My kids have never heard polka music before and Andie asked my dad, "Papa, are they just warming up?"  He said "No....that is what polka sounds like".  The kids loved watching the accordions play and I just felt like the whole scene was very quaint, small town America and I kept waiting for people to start waving flags and saying "God Bless America".

 After some time at the park and our local swimming hole, and playing in our driveway we had to get home and rest up for the next day because......

Andie and I were ready to do some mud running!!  I asked Andie about a month earlier what she thought about doing a running race through mud.  Her eyes lit up and I knew I had a running partner.

And she loved it!!  I think she had a permanent smile on her face.  We went down a water slide on the street, ran through a creek, crawled through some tubes, army crawled under rope (and through mud), ran up a really big hill, climbed over two cars, over a net obstacle, over a wall and through two mud pits, one which had a rope swing.

I completely thought my entrance into the mud pit was going to be a really cool, tarzanish jump into the mud.  Unfortunately the rope swing was rather slippery and gravity took over and I was ungracefully scraping my bottom down the mud hill while holding onto the rope.  Not the entry I envisioned.

But us ladies had a blast on Andie's first real run and she has officially caught the "running bug" and cannot wait to do another race.

Who needs to go to a spa to get a mud treatment.....

Honestly, my favorite part about the run, besides sharing a fun memory with my daughter, was showing her how fun it is to be physically active and be able to do stuff like this together.  I love that we were dirty, and sweaty, and worked hard and went over obstacles and did it all with smiles on our faces.  I especially loved when we were running up the big hill.....Andie looked at me as people were walking and said, "run every step"  which was something I told her we would try to do before the race began.  It doesn't have to be fast, it doesn't have to be pretty.....let's just do it!