Meet me at the State Fair!

The State Fair is becoming a fun family tradition. Every year we think of something to enter. Wes entered Lydia's Medieval dress this year. He won a blue ribbon!!! It was pretty exciting.

I am so spoiled to have a husband who can sew and make us all costumes. After looking at Wes' blue ribbon we decided to walk around the fair and find other fun things. Our first stop was the animals.

Violet was absolutely mesmerized by all the different animals. She had fun making all the different animal noises.

Lydia liked this "English" rooster.

Violet was especially excited with the goats.

Wes got Violet out of her stroller so she could pet the animals as well.

Lydia and Adelle liked looking at the animals as well. Poor Adelle met a cranky sheep though. She tried to pet him and he headbutted her hand into the railing. She was brave though and didn't cry.

We were all quite surprised by Father Goose. His geese were trained and he was able to get them to walk wherever he wanted.

Lydia's favorite animals are the pigs. These baby pigs were quite adorable.

We next headed to the produce building. They had a see through beehive. We also bought some fresh, local honey. It is SO good!

There were some HUGE pumpkins this year. I can't imagine all the work that this would take.

Adelle and I headed over to a building where you could fish outside in a pond, but the fishing had closed. Instead she looked at antlers and stuffed animals.

We met up with Wes and Lydia at the Art building and then we went to the craft building for our last stop.

Lydia and Adelle had a great time filling out a paper about the exhibits so they could get their own Rainbow Ribbons.

A few days later Lydia and I decided to enter the C & H Cookie Contest. You had to enter an original recipe so I came up with Root Beer Float Cookies! Lydia and Adelle were great tasters.

Lydia, Adelle and I had fun going to the fair together. It is an entirely different experience to enter a cook off instead of a regular entry. The prize money is bigger too.

You get to watch as the judges taste the cookies and scribble on their clipboards. There were about 10 different entries.

I didn't think we would win anything since it was our first year entering, and surely other people make better cookies.

We were absolutely astonished when we one First Place!! They really liked the originality of the recipe! We won a snazzy apron, a big blue ribbon and $75!

We had to get a picture of Lydia in front of the blue ribbon dress Wes made.

While Wes was very excited for us, I think part of him was a little miffed. He spent months working on the dress and got a smaller ribbon and a $4 prize. We had just made up a recipe the morning off and taken an hour to make the cookies and we were rewarded handsomely! I guess that is what happens when you have a big company sponsoring the contest. We did have to agree to sign over our recipe. Perhaps some day we will see it on a C&H Sugar bag :)