Kids are all about “horsing around.”

I can still hear the sound of my mom yelling at us four rambunctious kids to “stop horsing around” and I can imagine I’ll say it to Julia and Sophia too.

But I thought it’d be fun to take a moment and embrace the craziness of childhood play — especially the “rough-housing” and “horsing around.”

So, of course, what better way to celebrate our children’s memories in the making than with a photo contest!

The theme of the contest is “horsing around” and you can interpret that as children playing or take it more literally and let your photo display an equestrian theme.

UPDATE: Win one of three $100 Gift Certificates to A Rocking Horse To Love

When we announced this photo contest, we listed the prizes as one of three Henry Horse Rocking Horses. But because of the new CPSIA testing requirements it looks like popular Henry Horse hasn’t got his testing done and we won’t be able to sell him or give him away in the near future. I’m sure it’ll get sorted out soon, but likely not in time for our contest.

So… instead we are offering each winner a $100 Gift Certificate towards any available products from A Rocking Horse To Love.

Here are just a few examples of what you might select as a prize if you are one of the lucky three winners.

Rock and Trot Plush Rocking Horse	Ellie the Elephant
Childrens 3 Way Easel	Ziggy Giraffe Rocker

As we said, there will be three lucky winners.

1. The first winner will be awarded to the entrant whose photo receives the most votes.
2. The second winner will be the runner-up in the tally of votes
3. The third winner will be selected randomly from the entrants

The prizes are being donated from one of our online stores: A Rocking Horse To Love.

To read how to enter and get to the Mr. Linky, click on the read more below.

How to Enter

Here is how our “Horsing Around” photo contest/carnival will work:

• For the next two weeks, we will accept entries. Entry deadline is Friday, February 6th, 3pm Eastern.
• If you are a blogger, post your photo on your site and then come back here and add your link to the Mr. Linky. In your post on your blog, you can explain that it is a part of this contest and link back here.

  Also, we would really love it if you could also include in your post a link to our sponsoring store A Rocking Horse To Love.

• If you are not a blogger – you can still play!!! Just email us your photo, with the subject line HORSING AROUND Photo Contest, to 5minutesformom @ gmail dot com. (Please add your image into the copy of the email so that we do not have to open attachments.)
• Please enter only one photo in the contest.
• We will post the finalists on Tuesday, February 10th.

  Important Note: We will select about 20 finalists to enter the final stage of voting. We will be influenced by comments on this post… so it is FAIR GAME to ask your friends to leave a comment here on this post recommending we select your photo as a finalist.

  (We mention this because we’ve noticed in past photo contests that some entrants have had their friends comment and recommend a photo submission as a finalist.

  We want to let everyone know that it is fair to do that and we will be influenced by those comments, but the final selection of finalists will be a subjective selection of photos that we think best fit the theme. As Janice and I seem to be terrible with decisions, it’ll likely be Erica that makes the finalist selections.)

  We will use Democracy Poll for readers to vote on their favorite photo. Please Note: Democracy Poll only allows one vote per IP address.
  If you are selected as a finalist, feel free to announce it on your blog, facebook, twitter, etc and get your friends to vote for you. That is fair game. But please play fair and do not use proxy servers or other black hat methods of increasing your votes. If we do discover unfair practices, we will have to disqualify the parties involved. Remember the spirit of our site and play nice!

• Voting will end Friday, February 27th, 3pm Eastern. We will announce the winner the same day!

This contest is open only to US shipping addresses.

Please see our site’s Terms and Conditions of Use for a complete list of our Contest and Giveaway Rules. This promotion is void where prohibited.

Okay — so grab your camera and let your kids go wild!

Written by 5 Minutes for Mom Co-Founder: Susan

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