Small Success Thursday: Indiana State Fair

We're not Vulcans but we bleed green.  I'm a fourth-generation, 10 year 4-H member, and only by one generation did I escape going to the state fair at 6:30 AM to take care of show cattle.  Minus cows, besides the ones we eat for lunch, the Indiana State Fair is an annual summer tradition for my family.

I'm convinced Indiana has the best state fair ever.  There's always so much going on, but it's still got the old-fashioned down-home feel of a real 4-H-based fair.  We usually go during the week, to avoid the weekend crowds, and this year we landed a double-header of half-off tickets plus absolutely perfect weather.  It was cheerfully sunny and not too hot, with just enough of a cool breeze to keep us from sweating like the proverbial hogs, whose barn we skipped anyway.  

We were supposed to be taking a nice starting-off picture, but then the state fair jingle started playing, and yeah, I started dancing.

As a thank you to my dad for all the sweat and mileage he's put into moving us around this summer, and as a birthday gift for my mom, my sister and I took them to the fair instead of the other way around.  This meant that we could get the elephant ears we never got as a child...

Yes, that's a soybean hat.  Can you tell I'm a Hoosier?

We had a lovely day together.  Meredith and I got in touch with our inner 5-year-old and made little wooden trucks with the Junior Leaders:

Mine apparently has an overbite and is drooling.  The glue got a little messy.

We wandered through some of the crafts in the 4-H building, played a round of putt-putt golf in the FFA pavilion (Mommy won, of course,) chatted with a DNR ranger about camping at state parks, grabbed a hamburger from the beef producers' tent, wandered through the barn at the Pioneer Village, explored the Glass Barn to gather farming trivia, gleaned more trivia from my dad's farming days, wandered through more pavilions, admired the quilts and cross-stitching, grabbed freebies in the manufacturers' building, watched the jousting, and finished up the day with our traditional milk shake from the Dairy Barn.

Overall, a lovely day - definitely a success!  The only drawback was me stupidly taking 2 Benadryl for bad allergies, and being completely drowsy all day.  Oh well, I made it through, and it was mentally relaxing and enjoyable for all of us in the middle of a very stressful time.