The farm show - if you live here, you must go to it.

Which is why I always go. It takes a long time for me to get up to going and this year, I really put it off. We went on the last day, which is Saturday, and pretty stupid for a very crowded event. I am so bad with crowds, but as I said, because I live here, the farm show is an event I must attend.



First things first. We did something smart. The farm show opens for competition at 8 am and vendor exhibits at 9 am. I decided to get there at 8:30. All the exhibits may not be open, but I was pretty sure we could still hang out with the cows. This, my friends, may be the best decision I've made all year. In fact, it is. The year is new and this is the best I've done so far.

Why? Well, we have never been able to park in the farm show parking area. What do you do then? You park off site at the designated huge lot and push and shove to get on the bus. You see why I put this off every year. BUT, this year we got to park behind the building!! It felt like we won the lottery!



Got to see lots of cute animals and didn't have to wait for others to get out of the way. I am not fond of others, especially when they are in the way.

This guy was ticked off! He was yelling at another goat in a neighboring cage. The other goat was flat ignoring him, but I can tell that the minute they get out of those separate cages, mean goat was going to take ignoring goat down.



These guys were just really cute and were penned in an area with decent lighting, so I got several photos of them.





They even have pageants for the animals, shown below. The lady on the left is the judge and she told each person why his or her animal placed well or poorly. One goat, apparently, was not "feminine" enough. Ha!



If you want to know what farm show is like, this photo sums it up. Well, add the smell of cows, a strong smell of them, and you'll have a really good idea of what it's like. Actually, even if you leave out the photo, the smell may be enough to tell you all you need to know.



Sheep were interesting. I don't care for their Klan hats, but they seemed sweet enough. And they get mani-pedi spa days, farmer style.




These photos of the chicks are one reason we will always go early to farm show in the future. Usually there are about 6 layers of people surrounding the incubators, and you are lucky if you can barely squeeze the kid in for a quick peek, let alone a decent photo. We had all the time and space we needed.







There's also weird stuff like this. I lived in San Francisco, where there are not usually goats and cows and sheep, but there are tons of pigeons. We never felt there was anything redeeming about them, but these people do. They esteem them enough to bring them to the show for people to pet.



This horse was so sweet and beautiful. We could not resist offering our hands for it to eat. Luckily it wasn't hungry.



Moving on to what I consider to be one of the creepier things at the farm show, the famous butter sculpture. Ew. Plus, they insist on carving it into human shapes. It reminds me of what humans look like when their parents and grandparents are just a little too closely related. Ew.




Awww... what a sweet family I have.


Here are the obligatory tractor shots. One fun thing for the under 5 crowd is that tractor sales people bring tractors to sell to farmers, and they let people crawl all over them. Because of this, we always photograph the kids on one or more of them. Noah is now old enough to be too cool for tractors. Anna's too cool to care if she's too cool for tractors - they're fun!




Finally, the food. That's the real reason people come to farm show. Everyone has their list of must-have items. For us they are: milkshakes, french fries (although we decided that we will skip them next year - they look better than they taste), potato donuts, and fried cheese cubes.






Good thing Farm Show comes around only once a year. That food is not low fat.