[halfpint]

Hey All,

My name is Cindy and I finally admitted to myself, my friends and my family a couple of years ago that I wanted to be a clown. It happened something like this.I was sitting at work, having a particulary baaaad day, when I got the urge to google "clown college". Many years ago, when I was 18 I had wanted to go to Ringling's clown college, but didn't have the guts to buck the family and go for it...

Strangely enough, it turned out there was one practically on my back door step. Mooseburger Clown Arts Camp is held in Buffalo, MN. This is only 5.5 hours from Grand Forks,ND. I visited the site, read the testimonials, and kept thinking about going. Problem was, I was having a very hard time trying to figure out how to tell my family what I wanted to do.

Two months later, I was laying in bed with my fiance and told him"There is something I have to tell you." He said, "What is it?" I said, "I'm not sure how you are going to feel about this". His response was"What did you do, join the Alkiada?" When I explained it wasn't quite that serious, he was relieved and supportive.

It took another two months before I got around to asking my boss for the vacation time off and then tellling my kids. I thought my son was going to take it better than my daughter, but the opposite proved to be true. She made the comment at the time that she wished she could go too!

As fate would have it, the day before I was driving to camp a message came up on the camp group message site that due to a last minute cancellation a full tuition scholarship was available for the next person who called with a qualified camper who could attend . I called ,woke my daughter up and asked her if she really meant it when she said she wanted to go. She said she did so we called Mooseburger and she got the scholarship! Interesting huh?

We both attended camp 2006 and went back in 2007. I may never do a whole lot with what l have learned, but I will always treasure the fact that I got to share something so important to me with my daughter. We have done a birthday party together and even though we were pretty terrible (first for us both) the kids seemed to love the face painting and balloon animals anyway.