Fair!

Pushing a baby carriage through a livestock barn is like pulling a lunar rover over the surface of the moon by a piece of dental floss tied to the front bumper.

It's a bit rough.

Other than that, taking our tater tot to the county fair was super duper fun!

I have to own up to my ulterior motives in packing up the family circus and rolling two counties over to the Garland County Fair, where Daddy earned his stripes as a young stocksman during his high school years.  Since I had heard him enthusiastically recant tales of the whos and what-hows of raising and showing livestock there and then,  I thought it would be encouraging for him to return to the place where he had so many positive memories of his formative years and hoped he would reconnect with some of the folks who had been a part of them.

I think everyone in middle America begins to reminisce about their youth this time of year -- the smell of corn dogs and stadium popcorn drift in on the cool  northern frontal air, calling us back to the stock barns, carnival midways and football stadiums.  We become bewitched by September's sentimental spell, allowing it to work its magic upon hearts wearied with workaday worries of the adult world.  Like the children of Hamlin, we follow the piper's song back to the pleasures of our youth, reaching back to touch the version of who we once were.

If we're lucky, we get to experience these pleasures anew through the eyes of our children as they explore these worlds for themselves.

And if we're especially fortunate, we're afforded the opportunity to guide them through
the same proving grounds of small town identity.  We hope to share the enthusiasm for the wholesome things that sustained us through the turbulence of our own early lives,
those things that helped us make sense of the  world while still remaining safely guarded from it.

And so we will take Ava Leigh to see the fluffy sheep, and the muddy pigs, all manner of chickens both exotic and mundane, and the big blow-dried heifers pulled into the show ring by some determined pipsqueak with a steady lead hand and a sharp stick.  Mommy will make new friends, Daddy will become reacquainted with old ones as he retraces the sawdust paths he once walked a decade ago, and baby will take it all in, learning that there is a welcoming place for her in the refuge he once knew.