Milwaukee County Fair

Mom and I are headed to Florida tomorrow so we came down to Milwaukee this afternoon as we're flying out of here and wanted some extra time with the kids before we leave. Earlier this week, Stacy and the kids had worked really hard on some photographs, plants, and baked goods to enter into the Milwaukee County Fair -- like people used to do in the old days.

One of the volunteers working at the fair gave them a hard time about whether the exhibits were really done entirely by Jack, and was actually quite rude about the whole thing. Unless you're in 4-H, you have to be entered in the 'Open' category where the minimum age is 8 so Anna, at 6, wasn't allowed to enter anything and there was a question as to whether she helped Jack. That turned into quite the difficulty, but it was eventually ironed out and the stuff Jack brought was entered.

This evening, we took a ride over to the fair held, not surprisingly, at the State Fair grounds. It's really disappointing to see the lack of entries. People just don't get involved like they used to.

Much of the judging was done and we were really thrilled to see that the kids had 6 blue ribbons in photography (one for each of their entries), a blue and two red for the 3 container plants they had entered, a red for Jack's cherry tomatoes, and it appeared that he was also going to get a blue ribbon for his peanut butter-Nutella cookies. I took a quick peek at the judge's sheet for his cookies, and can see why it took her 5 hours to judge what really were very few entries all-in-all. They have to judge size, color, taste, texture -- lots of different components.

In the end, though, the kids are really excited to have the ribbons and I hope they continue to get involved in this type of activity. One of my favorite movies has always been 'State Fair' and the judging of the pickle relish (with the inadvertent addition of too much booze) has always been a classic. Just seems like simpler times.