"Lo, Children Are An Heritage of the LORD: and the Fruit of the Womb is His Reward" - Psalm 127:3

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Fun at the Fair

Friday I had a momentary lapse of sanity :) and decided to take all the kids to the fair - daycare kids included. It really was a fun day, but was completely exhausted after the fact. I did this with the help of my 20 year old son (my 18 year old daughter has been cooking at camp all week.)

There are always a lot of really fun things to do at the fair. This year they had a group of high schoolers who had designed robots, and they had them on display where people could try driving them. My 7 year old thought that was pretty fun.

This is the robot he was controlling. You can see the "arm" moving here if you look close. There was an obstacle course set up to drive the robots over. It was pretty fun.

Saturday we went back when Dad could go along, and he tried his hand at the robots too.

The littler kids enjoyed seeing the 4-H animals. Our 2 year old was especially excited about the chickens and the bunnies.

There was a group that had classes on animals - one animal at a time. The first class was on bunnies. All the kids got to hold bunnies and pet them. You can guess how big of a hit that was.

The next class was on beef. The kids got to bottle feed a calf. The 7 year old thought that was pretty cool.

The two year old wasn't sure he wanted to hold the bottle. Instead, he gave the calf a hug, then petted his nose ;)

We missed the class on draft horses, but made it to the last one - on chickens. They got to pet the chickens, but couldn't hold them because they would fly off. The neat thing about these classes was that they had 4-H kids explain all the details about the animals, and the animals that were brought to the classes were supplied by the same kids. So they were showing their own animals, and explaining all about raising them.

They also had a booth with lots of animal things on it - rabbit skins, a freeze dried horse hoof, hinged open so you could see the tendons and such, horseshoes of all different sizes, and examples of animal feed, with a magnifying glass for the kids to look up close at it. If you look on the table in the picture, you can see a Clydesdale horseshoe, along with a pony horseshoe. In the picture the 2 year old is pointing to, there is a picture of the largest and smallest horse breeds standing next to each other, face to face. They even had a gallon jar of rabbit poo and you had to guess the number of pieces.

There was a very large petting zoo - free to get into, but the feed was sold by the cup. The 20 year old bought some, and he and the 7 year old fed the animals by hand. Thankfully there was a hand-washing station set up nearby.


The two year old really liked this particular cow. They had brushes hanging nearby and the kids could brush the cows. I've gotta say, this was the biggest cow I've ever seen. And that's saying a lot since I grew up on a dairy farm in Nebraska, and we also raised beef cows. Then we moved to Wyoming where there are nice, big beef cows. This cow was an Ayershire, which the sign said are native to Scotland.

This cow (or whatever it was) is called a Watusi - known for their big horns. The picture doesn't do it justice. The horns were easily 5-6 feet EACH. The 7 year old once wrote a book he titled "Big Horns" which was about bull riding, so I wanted to get his picture with this real big horns. He didn't want to get anywhere near it :)

The two year old preferred the ducks. He sat himself down here and didn't want to move.

One neat feature at the fair was a man who was building a sand castle. This is what it looked like on Friday.

And here is the amazing progress he made by Saturday. We were all impressed.

Here is the other side.

The 7 year old wanted to ride the roller coaster. It was just a small kids' version. He wanted Dad to ride with him. Can you see his expression? Too funny.

He told me he was trying to "smile for the pictures" in this one. It was a rather forced smile - lol.

We all had a lot of fun just wandering around enjoying everything - including cinnamon kettle corn, elephant ears, barbecue brisket sandwiches, etc, etc. I bought several raffle tickets (mostly for quilts). Hope that pays off ;)

The weather was beautiful - mid 70's with a cool breeze when a rain storm was blowing in. It was a nice weekend :)

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