Highlights of the 2008 Iowa State Fair

Kids 5 and under get in free at the fair. We just had to take a picture of Big Sis with her first admission ticket...purchased in advance at Fareway, of course.

The Butter Cow....only at the Iowa State Fair. We had a butter Shawn Johnson this year, too.
The Little Hands on the Farm exhibit lets children explore the life cycle of crops grown in Iowa. They plant and harvest a garden vegetable, pick an apple, grow corn and soybeans, feed the corn to a cow, milk a cow, process their soybeans into biodiesel fuel, drive a pedal tractor, shear a sheep, gather an egg, sell all their produce and earn a dollar to spend at the store on the way out for a little snack. I think the girls went through this exhibit more times than we could count.




A new exhibit this year featured butterflies. For a $3 admission fee, I was able to teach Big Sis a lesson in butterfly reproduction. Where else can you photograph 2 butterflies mating in your daughter's hair?










The girls went down the slide with their cousins holding them.

Lil Sis and I stood around a long time waiting on this little guy to hatch. I took a 5 minute video before this one and then gave up and started over. You can hear how excited the onlookers were when he finally broke free. All week long, new life entered the world at the Animal Learning Center.

Here's a cute little lamb. The vet said the sheep haven't given birth yet during the day. They seem more comfortable delivering during the middle of the night. Here's a cute piglet. Big Sis was quite intrigued by a sow that had just given birth and watched the vet help deliver the placenta for quite awhile. You can be thankful I didn't take a video of that (kinda gross).
I missed the delivery of triplets by a few minutes.
Here's the big bull. There were 2 children brushing him while we were there. He seemed quite happy with the brushing. Based on the t-shirts they were wearing, I surmised they were relatives of the owner of the bull. They don't let just anyone in the pen with the "Super Bull".

Here's the Big Boar....the biggest big boar ever. He was so big, I couldn't get a picture of his whole body.
The last day of the fair is known as extreme Sunday. Cool Daddy-O and I had tickets for the grandstand show, featuring Garrison Keillor and Suzy Boggus. The performance lasted 3 hours and was very entertaining. Instead of taking a break during intermission, Garrison sang a song about urination and invited people to leave as they needed to. He asked the rest of the audience to stand and sing. We joined him in "America the Beautiful", "Home on the Range", "Old Man River", "The Iowa Waltz". He closed the show with another song with the audience. Immediately following the show, there was a cool fireworks display. I had fun experimenting with the fireworks setting on the camera.

Well, I think I'm caught up now. It's hard to capture all of the fair in one post. We went two days with the girls and two days without them. We saw everything we wanted to see, but didn't see everything. It was a record year for attendance and we can't wait for next year!!