Awesome Weekend Despite the Weather

Even though I was stressed about the weekend, it ended up being a great one!  I was so worried about the weather all week that I was breaking out in hives.  I shouldn’t have been worrying about it since there was nothing I could do about it but we had been planning an event for months that depended on the weather being good.

My daughter and I decided back in December that we wanted our 4-H horse project to have a fun, one day horse camp.  We’re both on the board and brought it up way back in December.  Some people thought it was a good idea and some thought it was just too much work.  No one supported us but we persisted.

We would talk about insurance one month, get everything set, and then come back the next month to find that nothing had been done about it and the other board members acted like we never talked about it.  It was so frustrating.  More than once, we wanted to give up but we kept at the planning.  Each month, we would expect to have conversation about it at those board meetings but we were ignored.  We set up a few clinic committee meetings but only one or two people would show up.  I was starting to think it wouldn’t happen because we weren’t getting an ounce of support.

Finally, we planned the entire thing ourselves.  We made arrangements with a professional drill team to come and work with the kids.  We found a trail pro to come and spend an hour teaching how to do trail and we got two kids from the youth board to help with some fun gymkhana games and teaching them to make rope halters.

As of Wednesday, the only forecast I was hearing called for rain and thunderstorms all day.  It kept changing slightly but the thunderstorm forecast never went away.  I was sick to my stomach because I didn’t have a rain date planned and there was no shelter at all at the place we were holding the camp.

Morning came and it was cloudy with the sun peeking through every now and then.  We were able to start at 10:00 a.m. with 9 horse members present.  Yay!  Everyone who had registered came with their horses.  Around 11:00 a.m. it started pouring and a few minutes after that the drill team pulled in with their 4 big trailers of horses.  I stayed calm and they said that they would stick around and try to wait out the rain.  It wasn’t passing over very quickly so they started anyways.  Everyone got drenched.  About an hour later, right when they started saddling up, it stopped raining and the radar cleared up.  They were able to finish rain-free!

They did a beautiful job with the kids.  In the short time they were there, they taught them a 7 and a half minute routine.  It was so awesome!!  The kids had a great time and learned so much from them.  After they were done with the drill team, they had lunch and then did the games.  Rope halters were last.  I had planned to go until 6:00 p.m. but thought we would end early because of the weather or because we didn’t have enough planned.  We ended at 6:00 p.m.  I couldn’t believe that we had timed it out so perfectly and that we didn’t have to end early because of the weather.

Everyone got their horses loaded without much trouble while I stayed behind to finish cleaning everything up.  It didn’t take much since we had kept everything so simple since we were doing it ourselves.  Oddly enough, it was thundering while I was cleaning up.  Tornado warnings had popped up a few counties away and I could hear the storm even though it wasn’t very close to where we were.  I was so thankful that we made it through the whole day without a thunderstorm or we would have had to leave.

It was wonderful to hear everyone talking about what a great day they had.  We knew the kids wanted to do something like this and no one else was going to do it.  I’m glad we kept working on it even without help.  On the way home, we got a sign from above that we did the right thing… a big bright rainbow filled the sky.