Horse Racing and Your Five-Year-Old

I feel the need to explain why we would take our 3 young children to a race track for "family time". 

Anne has been interested in horses for over a year now.  It started as a "My Little Pony" and unicorn thing, but she quickly moved to real horses as her main interest.  We get horse books from the library and point out horses when we are in rural areas, but the real boost came in May with the running of the Kentucky Derby.

In preparation for the race, Opa had told the kids a bit about the Derby and some of the things they would see.  Anne knew there would be horses and the crowd would sing a song.  They looked at the list of horses and each picked one.  Anne chose Golden Soul, Opa chose Revolutionary, and Sambo chose Orb.  We watched as the horses went to the starting gate, everyone sang "My Old Kentucky Home" and the race began.  To our amazement, the kids and Opa had picked the top 3 finishers!  This helped seal the deal on horse racing being a fun, exciting thing for the kids.

In the following weeks, as we waited for the Preakness and Belmont Stakes, Opa took it upon himself to teach Anne about the Triple Crown.  She was enamored with the idea, and most enchanted with the legendary Secretariat.  All of a sudden she's watching black and white YouTube clips of the 1973 Belmont Stakes and learning all kinds of facts about "Sec" (as she lovingly calls him).

She has now read several Secretariat books, seen the feature film about his life, and sleeps every night with a plush Secretariat, complete with blue-and-white checkered racing hood.  She calls herself Ron Turcotte (the jockey) when she rides her bike and is secretly glad that the horse who always came in second was named Sham, which conveniently sounds like Sam. :)

So all of this led to us spending a Sunday afternoon at the racetrack.  The kids were excited to pick their horse in each race, stand close to the track, watch the "winner's circle", and just be around a lot of animals.  They don't know anything about gambling or betting--just that it is fun to watch those big horses run!

And they're racing!  Sam, Cal, Anne, and Secretariat

What, your horse doesn't eat Kix with you?