State Fair

You may have noticed that August was a busy month for us and to keep the momentum going, we decided to finish it off with a trip to the MN State Fair with the kids. We have attended the fair every year since we moved to the cities and although it never changes, it is always a good time!

As you might have guessed, I used to go mostly for the food but now that he is getting older its fun to go with Ben and let him check out all the animals and exhibits. Poor Hallie was pretty much just along for the ride but I think she had an okay time too.

Ben went on his first fair rides this year and for the most part, he liked them. As you probably guessed, the pic above is from the Bumper Boats. We tried that ride first. He was excited to get in and seemed to be having fun for the first minute or two but then he started looking scared and asking to get off. I think it was because his boat kept spinning around in circles - that would've made my stomach a little queasy too! After the bumper boats we headed over to the cars (see pic in the collage below). He almost chickened out since it took awhile for them to get all the kids loaded and he was the first one in. Once the ride started, he got a big smile on his face and got into steering the car. Success! His final "ride" of the day was the GIANT slide with Jeff. He loved it! Being the paparazzi mom that I am, I have video of him on all the rides. I'll post the slide one at the bottom of this entry and if you want to check out the rest just visit my youtube page.


In addition to the rides, we had a good time checking out all the things to see at the fair. Ben was able to pet some cows, sheep, dogs, bunnies and quite a few horses. We also saw lots of tractors, ice houses, campers, boats, trucks and any other manly thing you can think of. You may have noticed in the pictures that Ben is wearing a John Deere sweatshirt. He has been wanting one for awhile after admiring our friend Chris's "shirt with a deer on it". We knew there would probably be John Deere apparel at the fair and the day was a little chillier than we planned so we bought one (expensive) sweatshirt for our deer loving Benny boy. :)

Here is the slide video. Jeff and Ben are the ones that come down on the far right side of the slide on the very edge a few seconds after the video starts.