We have gone to county fairs the last two weekends. I like fairs, don't get me wrong, but I am starting to feel a little silly about going twice. We went to the Marion County Fair on Thursday of last week (July 10) then on Saturday of the following week (July 19) we went to the Linn County Fair. The Linn County Fair seemed to be better attended (although we did go on different days of the week, so it's a little harder to really compare) and there were more ride options for the littler kids. I entered two jams, my snickerdoodles and some garlic in the Marion County Fair.
Funny thing... Nana was raving about my strawberry jam and was sure it would win first place. I also entered my cherry jam. The cherry jam ended up taking third and the strawberry jam didn't place at all! The snickerdoodles won third prize in the drop cookies lot, and ironically, the garlic, which I threw in at the last minute (because I harvested my garlic from my community garden and realized I had 125 heads of garlic to choose from), took first prize and best of class. This is entirely due to the fact that there were only about 10 entries total in the vegetables class, and I was the only garlic entry. It made me laugh. I went by the entries multiple times throughout the day just because I thought it was so funny how the judging turned out completely differently than I expected. Anyway, entering stuff in the fair is fun. I'll try again next year. The only bummer is that the judges didn't write any feedback about my entries, so I'm not sure what I should have done differently for the jams (the snickerdoodles I am assuming is more a personal preference, since there are lots of different kinds of cookies in "drop cookies"... mine won out over the other snickerdoodle entry - not that it actually matters at all - but it is fun). I looked online for guidelines for how to display the garlic and found a pretty in-depth explanation from some place in Wisconsin, so maybe there is something similar for jams. The fair people said their guidelines were in their entry information, but I found it to be a little vague. They also said I couldn't watch the judging, but I'm sure it would have been informative. Maybe next year I can finagle my way in to observe the judging.
Actually, next year, it would be fun to have Isaac enter some things in the fair. There are categories for art, and even Lego sculptures!
This is probably over-the-top boring for people who don't enter things in county fairs, so without further ado, I'll just go on to pictures of the kids.
These are from the Linn County Fair.
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