Susan's Homeschool Blog

Normally I don’t like going to the state fair. The rides are rickety and overpriced, the food is greasy and way too expensive, and the games are nearly impossible to win. Booths sell stuff that you don’t need. Everything is loud and flashing. So for the past several years I’ve skipped the free homeschool tickets to the fair. Even going in for free on a weekday, you end up leaving with empty pockets and $100 flown out the window. Is it worth it? Normally, no. But this year I enjoyed it.

First we saw the animals. My daughter found a miniature horse that was the size of a dog. We fed some sheep right out of our hands. We looked at goats, pigs, rabbits, roosters, and cows. The highland cow was my favorite animal of the day, because it reminded me of Scotland. I forgot how much my daughter loves animals. Maybe some day she’ll be a vet.

Other buildings included all kinds of displays: quilts, artwork, crafts, flowers, baked goods, and vegetables. Bees were located behind glass, and you had to find the queen. We bought straws with honey in them for ten cents. We touched the grains in many different baskets to feel and see the difference between the many grains. We also felt different patches of fur to see if we could identify the animals.

We went to a tractor pull, where kids had to pedal a tractor with more and more weight attached to it. We went to pig races, where small pigs ran as fast as they could around a track. (The sound effects were comical, as they sounded like cars racing.)

We ate lunch on a patch of grass under a tree. Yes, the food was overpriced, but I decided to get a pita with meat and hummus and lots of fresh vegetables, and it was actually quite good. After eating, three kids wanted to ride on llamas, so we did that.

We toured an antique train, which had many different compartments, including a sleeping car, a dining car, a bathroom, a kitchen, and other cars that had antique stuff behind glass, like a museum does. The hallways were narrow, and the car that had seats also had an overhead compartment which people used to pull down (as a bed) to go to sleep. The last car had a model train set that was quite elaborate. As soon as we exited the train, we took a train ride on a much smaller train.

As we walked along, men would show us antique machines and how they worked. One man branded a piece of wood with a hot iron, and we had a free souvenir.

The lumberjack show was fun. Men threw axes at a bull’s eye, chopped wood as a contest, used chainsaws, used old-fashioned two-person saws (and beat an electric chainsaw), rolled on a log and fell into the water, cut a chair out of a log, and climbed up and down a pole really fast.

But the most incredible thing we did was to get inside a huge ball and bounce around in the water, running like a hamster in a cage. The three kids that wanted to do it were grinning from ear to ear as they splashed around without getting wet.