The Fair! The Fair!

"I am so behind on my blogging."

I wonder when that thought first popped into my head.  Maybe a few weeks after I started my first blog, way back in January of 2007?  :)  Regardless of when that mental chorus first started its endless repeat, I can say assuredly that I have heard it thousands of times since then.  Things that I want to blog about ALWAYS slip through the cracks.  I NEVER can get caught up.  I cannot even stay caught up, much less try to dig out from under the weight of posts that I intended to write in the past but never did.  It's hopeless.  :)

Right at the moment, I have 42 drafts in my drafts folder.  42 posts I started and never finished.  42 topics that were at some point important enough to me to begin a post.  And there they sit.  42 of 'em.  (Well, when I hit "publish" on this one, it'll drop down to 41.  Progress, folks.  There's progress.)  ;-)

So, if I ever hope to get that number to slide down, I'm just gonna have to give some of these "a lick and a promise" and then post them...even if I don't get to write as much as I would like to go along with the photos.  Even if I can't make it fit together as perfectly as I would like.  Even if...

Here, then, in condensed, let's-just-get-this-posted fashion is our 2013 trip to the fair.  You've already seen the most exciting part: receiving ribbons for the cookies we entered.  But that wasn't the only fun part.  Of course, we had to stop and watch the cute little ducklings slide down the hill in their quest for a bite of food.  :)

And then there were the rides...  :)

Moriah got a little more-than-a-little tired of being confined to the stroller, but here she managed to show me a grin.  :)  At least there was a lot of colorful stuff to look at while she was hanging around waiting for her big brothers.  :)

Those tall swings?  It's hard to tell from the photo, but they really were high up in the air.  None of my family was interested in riding on those.  This year.  :)

Half a lemon from the fresh lemonade we bought helped to keep Moriah entertained for a little while.  :)

Last year, Jeff took this picture of Moriah and I at the fair...

...so this year, to continue the tradition, I knew I wanted a picture with my girl.  The night was getting late, and we happened to be in the cattle barn when we finally got around to doing this.  :)

This year was the first in which the big boys decided to go on this Starship 4000 ride.  It's not exactly a kiddie ride (at all!), but they (including Tobin) LOVED it and went on it many, many times.

And Moriah just kicked back and watched the world go by as the lights spun wildly behind her.  :)

Before I end this, I must mention three things about the fair this year: two good, and one bad.

First, as we approached the ticket booth to buy tickets to enter the fair, someone whom we didn't know at all randomly came up to us and said, "Here, we have an extra ticket.  You can have it."  Well!  OK, then!  It's not like the $5 that saved us was a huge amount of money, but $5 is $5, and we were very grateful for it.  :)  Unexpected kindnesses do make the heart sing.  :)

Second, with having five kids and two parents, it takes a little creative juggling to make sure each child gets to do (some of) what he wants.  At one point, Jeff took Josiah and David to ride some bigger rides, and I had the younger three.  Shav really wanted to go on the merry-go-round, so I took them over there...only to discover that because of his height, he needed to have an adult go on the ride with him.  Well, not only was that impossible for me because of having Moriah, but also I didn't have any tickets or an armband for the rides, and accompanying adults HAD to have tickets or an armband - no free rides on that merry-go-round!  Shav was disappointed, of course, but he quietly stood with me and didn't make a fuss as we watched Tobin go around on it.  I was hoping that later, we would get a chance to buy tickets for either Jeff or I to go on it with him, so that he would get to do the ride that he had talked about the most as he had anticipated the fair.  I hated the thought of him not being able to do it at all.  Well, sometime later as we walked by the merry-go-round with all of us together, the lady who was running the ride (and who had been quite strict earlier in the evening) motioned for Jeff to go ahead and get on it with Shav...even without any tickets.  Having grace shown to us in that way was refreshing and much-appreciated, and I was glad that my sweet little Shav got to go on his favorite ride.  :)

Last thing...  When we left the fair, it was already really late; but we needed to drive across town to pick up a new-to-us computer that Jeff found on Craigslist (because we needed a computer for some school stuff for the boys, and the laptop we used to have wasn't cutting it anymore but was leading to intense bursts of frustration at its slowness and ineptitude!).  It was late, it was dark, we couldn't find the address...and Moriah threw up.  Several times.  What???  There had been no signs that she was getting sick, so it caught us completely off-guard.  To say the least, it was not the most relaxing ride we've ever had as a family.  At least we were in the big white van, and boys whose noses were particularly sensitive to the unpleasant aromas wafting from Moriah's seat could go sit way in the back of the van.  ;-)  We eventually found the place, got the computer, headed home, gave Moriah a bath, put her to bed, and...that was the end of it.  No more throw-up, no more sickness.  We're still not sure what happened to cause it.

Maybe it was that lemon she'd been sucking on...  ;-)

Pictures from last year's fair are here and here.  :)