A DAY AT THE FAIR

A little over a week ago, R and I took C and IJ to the Marquette County Fair. I kept telling C that we were going to the carnival, since he saw an episode of Dora where they went to the carnival and had to "collect tickets to win prizes" (or maybe it was a Dora game, I'm not sure). Because of that, he has talked a lot about going to a carnival. As soon as he saw the Ferris wheel looming above the pine trees, he started shouting "Mommy! Daddy! The carnival! It's the carnival!" He was so excited, and kept talking about the "collecting tickets to win prizes" thing. I didn't really want to tell him that that wasn't how this fair worked; I just told him that we would play games and he would get a prize.

We found a kiddie fishing game that both boys could play where they were guaranteed to get a prize. C grabbed a pink "fishing line", and I showed him how to drag it to "catch" a fish. It didn't take him very long to snag a fish, and he held it up proudly, "I caught a fish!". I led him over to his prize box while R helped IJ with his fishing pole. He picked a set of spinning tops that could be made into a tower, and IJ picked a plastic ball and bat. Then C tried to grab the fishing pole so he could fish again. I told him that he already had his turn and we were going to go do other fun stuff. He couldn't really understand that we had to pay money every time he wanted to play (and we had already spent $4 just for the boys to play once); he just wanted to catch the fish. If I could, I would have kept dishing out the $2 and let him play however many times he wanted, but that's just life I guess. He forgot about it pretty quick as we moved on to other things. I'm hoping R will take him fishing for real here one of these days.

One of my favorite parts of the day, though, was when we went to see the horse barn. As we passed by all the horses with their heads sticking out of their stalls, C started singing "Old McDonald", just the first part till the "e-i-e-i-o". Still, it was pretty perfect. :)

Here are some of my favorite shots from the fair:


This was a really friendly goat at the petting zoo. Either the goat just likes kids a lot, or it wanted to nibble on their clothes. :) The boys thought it was great, though. Every time IJ touched an animal, he would yell excitedly "Mama! I touch! I touch!"

Cute little piglets!

This was the "Dragon" roller coaster. Last year I went on it with C and he loved it; this year he was big enough to go by himself. It was weird watching him from the sidelines, he's growing up! He's going to be going on all the big coasters with daddy when he gets older-he loved the Dragon and went on it twice. He sure doesn't get it from his mommy.

In the giant time-unlimited bounce house!

Wave to daddy! They thought this was great the first couple of times around, then they got bored and wanted to get off while it was still going around. Yep, they definately take after R.

The boys and I on the carousel. I kept telling C to look at daddy for a pic, but he would always look in the wrong direction. :)