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!!

Now, I'm Going On Vacation!!

The past week has been excitingly chaotic. On Wednesday, we began our little family vacation by going to the zoo in Omaha where we met up with friends. We then spent two nights in our capital city and attended the Iowa State Fair. We had a blast! Most of our time was spent experiencing "Little Hands On The Farm", the "Butterfly Pavilion", and the "Animal Learning Center". We highly recommend all three activities for children of all ages. Lil Sis and I watched a chick hatch. We have the video, actually. I'll post pictures at a later time.

We had so much fun at the fair, that Cool Daddy-O and I returned on Saturday while the girls had a slumber party with g-pa and g-ma.

On Sunday, we attended a family reunion. Following the reunion, we were talking about our little vacation and my sister-in-law asked how we liked staying in Iowa. I told her it was fun, but we would have rather gone to Colorado. My dad immediately said he'd love to go if someone would take him. He's 82 and recently widowed and loves Colorado. He even offered to buy gas, lodging and food for anyone who would take him. After I realized he was serious, Cool Daddy-O and I had a little conference outside. He had an awesome idea and we're going with it.

Dad and I are leaving in the morning and we're driving straight to the front range. We'll spend time sightseeing in Colorado for 2 days and then we'll drive home on Friday. Cool Daddy-O is going to spend the rest of the week at home, half working, half vacationing and having fun with the girls.

Lil Sis and I cried when I told her the plan. Big Sis begrudgingly said it would be o.k. for me to take grandpa on his vacation. Cool Daddy-O has promised lots of fun going to the park, playing with play dough, painting, a slumber party in the living room, and swimming in the little pool if it gets hot. They're pretty excited about the whole deal now.

We're calling it Daddies and Daughters week. I hope to be able to post daily from the road about our adventures. I won't be able to include pictures, but I'll describe things best I can.

For the first time in a long time, the backseat of the Accord is "empty" and void of any signs of children. We moved the Britax seats to the Civic, so the girls can ride in style this week.

Gotta get packing...more later from the road!

Collecting Ribbons and Coupons

This evening Big Sis and I went back to the fair to collect her artwork and ribbons. She earned a whopping $4.50. We haven't yet talked about what she'll do with her winnings. Perhaps we'll just put it in the bank. Or, perhaps, she could use it to pay me to clean the toy room. Yeah, there's a story that goes with that statement :)

This afternoon, I asked Big Sis if she'd help put toys away in the toy room while I folded and put away her clothes. I gave her the option of earning 50 cents if she did it herself, having me help her and earning nothing, or paying me 50 cents to clean the toy room. She got out her coins and we counted her money. She decided she would be happy to pay me to clean. I told her we should talk to Cool Daddy-O about her decision and see what he thought.

After discussing all the options again, Big Sis decided that she would rather clean the room on her own and make some money. She worked for awhile and made nice progress. Finally, she decided she needed a break. She became engrossed in a TV program and said she'd finish later. I decided to reward her and give her half the money since she had completed much of her task. She said she'd do the rest tomorrow.

Here's a close-up of the collage that won Best of Show in her age group.

The other highlight of our day was a family effort. One of the local gas stations offers a free newspaper with the purchase of gasoline. There was a coupon that I wanted multiples of. So, we took both cars to 2 gas stations, where we each purchased the amount that qualifies for a free paper. I went to a 3rd gas station and squeezed in some more gas in my car and got a 5th paper. What was this coupon? It's a buy 1 get 1 free coupon for the hair color I use. Since I have so much hair, my hair stylist uses 2 boxes to color my hair...and I color it every 6 weeks. Each box costs between $7.50 and $8.70 depending where I buy it. So, we figured we saved about $40 in hair color expense, or looking at it another way...it makes the gas much cheaper.

Yesterday I had a great afternoon. I was able to spend a couple hours hanging out at Target. We needed to get a second car seat for the second car. I'll be taking the primary kid hauling car to Iowa City on Friday and Cool Daddy-O will need to drive the girls around town for various activities. The new booster seat has 2 cup holders. The old one doesn't have any. Big Sis is willing to share her extra cup holder with Lil Sis. What could be better?

She Decided To Stay...

We've been going to the fair a lot! Yes, we're crazy! Yesterday, we went to the 4-H and FFA horse show. It rained all day, so it was good to be inside. Big Sis had her 3rd corn dog.

Tonight we returned to the fair for supper and the demolition derby. Big Sis ate her 4th corn dog. I had my second tenderloin (yum). The girls lasted through 4 heats and a final round of the compact car class. Then they were done. Cool Daddy-O made arrangements for me to get a ride home with our neighbors and he took the girls home. I'm glad he did. There was only one heat of full-size cars, but they were DEAFENING! It was fun to watch.

Cool Daddy-O said it was kinda hard for him to watch the cars get demolished. He's very much into vehicle maintenance and getting as many miles as we can our of our beloved Hondas. On a good note, there were no Hondas or Toyotas in the derby. Fortunately, they're mostly still out on the road.

This morning, the girls were not allowed to watch TV (in part due to yesterday's behavior -- long story). They decided to play with Lincoln Logs and then Big Sis built a log cabin she was quite proud of. After that, the girls became quite irritable with one another and a fight broke out. I decided I was going to put the Lincoln Logs away and out of reach for a consequence. oops!

Big Sis came unglued when she discovered what I had done! She stomped back to her room, screaming and crying. After some time had passed, she stomped out and placed a hand written note on the kitchen table. Here's what it said:

I am going to the othr sid the wrld. frome big sis

I took the note back to Big Sis's room and talked to her about it. I couldn't quite understand what it said, so she told me she was packing up her things in her backpack and she was going to leave to go to the other side of the world. I asked her how she was going to get there. Her plan was to take a plane. I was able to talk her out of running away and all was forgiven.

Here is Big Sis pretending to be sad and posing with her run away note.

On another note, the girls had their first swimming lesson on Wednesday. We finally convinced Lil Sis to sit on the edge of the pool and dangle her toes in the pool. I think she will be more brave next time. It's too bad the lesson only lasted 30 minutes and half of that time was sitting outside of the pool talking about safety. I think another 15 to 30 minutes and she would have been in the water too. At least they both left wanting to go back.

That's all for now. We're going to hang out at home tomorrow and will do some cleaning, laundry, mowing, etc.

Ribbons At The Fair

The girls and I went to the county fair this morning. Big Sis entered a few drawings / pieces of artwork in the Junior Arts competition. Last night she worked on a collage using the technique she learned earlier this summer at a class she attended. I'll upload a picture of it later. I didn't get a chance to take a picture of it yet. It turned out pretty nice. She also entered several other drawings she had colored with crayon, markers, tempera paint, and another crayon design. She ended up with a red ribbon, several blues, and one purple (for the collage).

Other cool stuff we saw:

• a showering sheep...he was NOT happy about it
• a friendly lamb whose best friend is a horse
• an Angus calf named Hershey's
• a pen of pigs enjoying a bath
• an attacking turkey (don't worry, it didn't hurt, but it did scare the sh*t out of me)
• crowing roosters
• furry bunnies

I know it's not healthy, but, Big Sis ate two Jumbo Corn Dogs today. For an afternoon treat, Big Sis got a huge chocolate ice cream cone and Lil Sis got a blue raspberry shaved ice. Big Sis got full, so Lil Sis ate the rest of the cone. I got the rest of the shaved ice. It was definitely a WIN - WIN situation!

We send out Kudos to Uncle J today on being part of a #10 Country song. WhooHoo!

Swimming lessons commence tomorrow. The girls are excited!

I'm hoping to stay away from the fair tomorrow. We'll definitely go back later in the week. We have to pick up Big Sis's prize money!

*Dryer Update: I think I forgot the share the good news. The dryer was fixed quickly. It is working better than ever!