God's Blessings of Fun!

I wanted to share of God's goodness to us over the last week. We were able to do a whole bunch of awesome things for free, which is such a blessing, as our funds are a little limited right now. 
It is stampede week here in our home town. Our stampede is the largest 7 day outdoor rodeo in Canada and from here most of the contestants go down to the Calgary Stampede.  About 50,000-70,000 people attend the events at our rodeo. 
Every year our town impresses us more and more. They go out of their way to make everyone feel welcome. So there are free pancake breakfasts everyday of the rodeo in different places around town. We were able to make it to 2 of these. Also this year a local butcher shop was serving a free barbecue everyday! They were serving amazing, huge burgers with all the toppings, beef on a bun, different types of sausages and pop. We were able to make it there 3 afternoons. They kept telling us to come back and bring friends, so we made sure to tell a bunch of friends about it as well.  Another thing our town does for the out of towners coming to the rodeo is offer all free camping.  They also put on fireworks shows almost every night. We went to 2 nights and they were beautiful.

Then, there is the Stampede Parade.  The kids always have a blast watching it AND getting all the candy. But at our parade, they don't just hand out candy, they hand out free tickets to a local car raceway (they gave us enough for our family and Larry's parents to go while they are here), coupons off the admissions price to the County Fair and free Frosty coupons for Wendy's.

Here are my kids enjoying the parade

The kids enjoying the free barbecue at Family Meats

The kids going into the hotel

After we enjoyed all these fun events in our home town, we headed south 40 mins to the closest big city to use up some vouchers Larry had earned while working in the States with his rewards program. He earned a free hotel stay and 4 free movie tickets to any theatre we wanted. So we went to the big theatre to see Madagascar 3 in 3D. My kids have never been to a big theatre before, so this was pretty cool. (Well, Rebekah had been once 7 or 8 years ago).

In the theatre

Then on Sunday, while we were enjoying the pancake breakfast before Cowboy Church, a man approached Rebekah and asked her if we had tickets to the rodeo that afternoon. She told him no, (we could not afford it) and he handed her 2 awesome tickets and told her to enjoy! Our really good friends were going as well, so I let Rebekah and her friend sit together in our seats and I sat up with the rest of the family. God is so good and his mercies are new every morning.

Steer roping

Mounted Shooters

Horse riding

Canada Day fireworks

To top off our great day, we headed back to town for the Canada Day fireworks to celebrate our country's 145th year.

It was lots of fun. When I think of God's goodness to us, I feel so inadequate, but I will really just treasure these memories we made and thank the Lord who made it all happen.