Fairly Fun

My kids look forward to the County Fair all year.  Then, five minutes after we get there, one of them says, "I'm ready to go home now."

When we first arrived, these four bikers were doing impressive jumps!

Can you see this one upside down?

Dexter and Trevor thought it was too loud, both the bikes and the audience, so I guess I'm glad we didn't see their whole show, but I was happy to see what we did see.

My favorite part is the hall with the creative living and home arts exhibits, or whatever it's called; partly because it's air-conditioned and there is a bathroom and drinking fountain there, but mainly, I like the quilts and other cool stuff.

I love art made from different fabrics pieced together!

This is a cool working clock:

Cool mixed media using paint and quilling paper; at least I think it was paint, now it kinda looks more like colored pencil, but the kids were trying to rush me out of there to the rides, as if that's the most fun part of the fair, sheesh.

Picture of wands for my Harry Potter fan daughter:

I love music and art and art about music:

My oldest son liked this one, cool colors and perspective:

This one's pretty simple, but the hanging cloth is a separate piece of paper, hanging on an actual string with real clothes pins. Makes you take a double take, wondering how they got it to look so 3-D!

OOh, this one has a name, so they get credit and first place, apparently. Made of metal:

Awesome melty crayon with fabric flowers! I began a project like this and never finished. Time to be inspired.

This is stained glass without the staining. Impressive!

Fancy leaf & squares quilt and pinwheel quilt and hexagonal quilt in the background:

There is always a Christmas display case and Dexter noticed something funny on this Santa's belt:

(It's a Creeper face, in case you aren't familiar with Minecraft.)

We thought this was a really well done portrait made from torn paper:

(We hope it wasn't a self-portrait, poor guy is a bit green in the face.)

My Harry Potter fan daughter is also a Hunger Games fan, so I took a picture of this quilt for her. This elementary school had kids draw pictures and write part of the story underneath it. I wish I knew how they transferred them to fabric. I suppose I can Google it.

More art of music:

Some of the place settings are very elaborate, well all of them, actually.  I don't usually spend a lot of time looking at them, but this Narnia place setting really caught my eye:

And I think this old-school wooden scooter is way awesome! 

The rest of my pictures are mostly of rides, which I've already posted on that social networking site which shall not be named.  I was happy that my number one son decided to come with me without me having to beg or plead or threaten. I was mentally prepared to only take the small four like I did last year, but since he came, I let him choose whatever snacks he wanted from the store that we stopped at on our way.  I like to go on the day that they accept four non-perishable food items as payment for admission and all rides are only $1 each.  I bought 15 ride tickets for the three kids (G, D, & T) to go on five each.  That was almost more fun than we could stand, partly because it was hot and partly because Trevor is too small for the rides Geneva likes, so we have to go from her side to his side and it just seems to take forever, even though there were hardly any lines, and partly because we were thirsty. They never had to wait through more than one run of any ride before getting on and several times there was no waiting; the beauty of going on a Wednesday.

I love their smiles as they come off this slide!  Oh, and I did offer to Christian to ride a ride, but he doesn't really care for such things.

Trevor was scared to go on the merry-go-round without me, so I used one of his tickets.  Z didn't like that I walked away, but Christian is such a good big brother, he held her where she could see us go round and round.  He liked the Cars ride, though. Dexter likes rides with both Geneva and Trevor.

And these kids found some shade to enjoy while waiting for them. I told Christian he looks like an elf in this picture and thanked him from condescending into the mortal realm to join us in our mundane adventures.

Then, Trevor still had one left after the bigger two had used all theirs, but he couldn't decide which one to go on, so I took everyone to the music tent nearby and left them with Christian, except Dexter followed me and I was holding Z, so really only Geneva stayed at the music tent with Christian.  Anyway, I talked Trevor into going on the train. He said it was too hot last year, but I pointed out a train car that had a top, so it was shaded and he was happy.

I wanted to go to one more exhibit hall, but everyone was complaining of feet hurting and my dogs were barking, too.  Christian kept asking during the first exhibit hall how long we were going to stay at the fair, so just to get him to stop asking, I said five o'clock. So, he was pleased when we got to the car and it was an hour earlier than that.

As we were walking toward the exit, I saw a family standing by a table, but their little boy was sitting on the table and the grandma was rubbing his back and his eyes were closed and he was starting to sway, he was so relaxed and sleepy.  Poor kid.

Trevor fell asleep in the car before Z did, but she followed shortly after.  It was a good day.

Then, Christian didn't want to go to Scouts that night, since he had been gone most of the day, but he went anyway, like a trooper!

Then, my hubby went to pick them up, (after going to the fair, I took a shower and put on my pjs, so that was why I didn't want to be the carpool driver), and he took the van for carpooling and left the lights on while waiting, which killed the battery. He failed to mention that he also had his laptop plugged into the lighter, but he swears it was the lights that killed it and not the laptop.  He likes to keep life interesting like that.  Fortunately, someone there had jumper cables, but Chris was a bit embarrased to have to get out of the van in his pajama pants.  Ha ha ha!  He had worked at home and hadn't gotten dressed that day.  We love summer!