Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Mini-vacation

I took Monday and Tuesday of this week off for some mental health purposes. On Monday, I took my nephew, Ethan, to the Iowa State Fair. I figured after chasing after him all day, I'd need a day to rest and catch up.

We arrived at the fair just before 10 on Monday and got a funnel cake. It's vacation, right? There was a veterans parade, so we grabbed some curb and sat down to watch it. As the different troops went by we watched and cheered at different times. Eventually, a WWII replica jeep passed. I turned to Ethan and said, "That's the kind of jeep that your great-grandpas would have ridden in when they fought in WWII." (Keep in mind he has met neither of these men as my maternal grandpa died before I was born and my paternal grandpa died when I was nine). Ethan's response - blank stare basically communicating, I have no idea what WWII is and I don't know who the heck those people are either. I gave about two seconds of thought to explain WWII to Ethan and decided it was a concept for another day.
Posing on a lion, the kid loves playgrounds. I probably could have just taken him to one of those.

We took off for the midway as he wanted to ride some rides and play some games. These are things that I don't normally do at the fair, and I know he doesn't do either. Other than maybe the "Giant Slide" or "Sky Glider." He enjoyed some bumper cars, small roller coaster,I rode something that I thought was going to make me vomit from spinning, and we won some stuffed animals.

Time to find more food and free stuff. He loaded up on some free tatoos, and went to play in the spray fountain, and some nice older lady gave me some free ride tickets. Seriously, is the Midwest great or what?


Fair Squares - Being sold for $2, I opted for the with peanut butter, the plain ones, were also $2, but twice this size.

After a healthy lunch of food on a stick, we sat and watched a free kids show, checked out the butter cow and butter Dr. Suess. And then headed over to the "exotic" petting zoo. We were able to feed the animals here, most of which were goats, which are apparently exotic. Um, okay. After which Ethan and I had a discussion about needing to use the hand sanitizer. Which basically boiled down to because you need to as I didn't quite know how to explain hoof and mouth disease to him.

After almost 6 hours at the fair, we were both tired and decided to call it a day and headed back to the car. Here's what Ethan looked like when I got back to my sister's house....
Wiped out.

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