Our Trip to the Kiwanis Fair

Well, even though me and Jamie were both completely exhausted after work yesterday, Lilly asked me to go to the Kiwanis Fair that's currently set up in town.  I had originally planned to take Lilly to the Fair either Saturday (after she attended a friend's birthday party in the afternoon), or all day on Sunday (which is the last day of the Fair).  But I thought 'what the heck; why not' and we all piled up in the car and went to town.

First at the Fair, we came upon the little petting zoo, and we all died of cuteness overload from these super-ultra-sweet tiny baby bunnies!:

Next, there was a cute li'l pig, all wagging its little tail like a happy li'l doggy would, grunting, and wanting to be petted:

Jamie said it felt like pettin' a bristle-broom.

Lilly petted it too, but I didn't get a good picture of that.  

(I actually took all these pictures and videos with my new phone, and it was the first time I'd really messed with the camera part of it, so I wasn't quite used to it yet):

So then I wanted to have a turn petting the cute li'l piggie, but when I was about to try, it ended up pushing its funny li'l snout onto my bent knee, throwing me off-balance just enough to knock me down on my rear-end (LOL)!:

Next, we checked out this sweet, soft, fuzzy donkey:

Its hair was surprisingly softer than expected!  :):

There were some ponies next to the donkey:

I thought one of them might be pregnant, because its belly looked kinda fat, but then it turned around and I saw its ugly ol' wrinkly black goober hanging down, and I instantly realized that it was a boy!  Lilly was right next to me when it happened, and she saw its goober too at the same time I did, and we looked at each other in surprise and I explained, "It's a boy; that's its goober...so it can't be pregnant!"  And then me and Lilly frowned together in disgust over seeing its yucky goober.  LOL!  :P

Next up, the goats!:

In the pen together, there was a mama goat with her little baby (who kept trotting around trying to suckle her jug), and another brown goat (who I overheard someone who was watching them too say "oh great...it's a male").  And the 'male' seemed to be kind of playfully harassing the female.  (I didn't personally inspect to see if the brown goat was indeed a male -- and I wouldn't trust stranger's judgment since goat 'junk' looks weird, and it can sometimes be hard to distinguish a male from a female in a fleeting glance).

Anyway, the goats were fun to pet:

(Even though I have a sneaking suspicion that the goats were secretly just using us as their own personal salt-licks, and not actually 'giving us kissies')  :/

Then I wanted to pet the goats, and when I did, they gobbled my fingers!:

I've never had that experience before (I usually try to keep my fingers away from all animals' mouths under the assumption that they will most likely bite the total crap out of you, and you might even lose a finger, or at the very least need stitches), but these goats' biting didn't hurt at all!  It actually felt kind of tickly and funny!  Their teeth weren't sharp; they actually felt kind of flat (probably for grinding up hay and stuff).  Hmm!  Who knew?

Then Lilly wanted to move onward to ride the rides.  She ended up having to ride the rides by herself for a while.  There weren't a whole lot of kids there at first (because we got there soon after they just opened --5:00 PM on a Friday).

As we were standing around waiting while Lilly was riding rides, I looked around just to see what I could see.  Of course there were several different (usually rigged) games to play, where you could win (cheap, silly) prizes.  One of the large prizes in particular caught my eye.  At first glance, I thought it was a gigantic butt!:

So I studied it closer, and finally realized that it was actually a giant stuffed-animal pig!:

(WHEW!  LOL!)

Before too terribly long, lots of kids showed up that Lilly knew.  At one point, Lilly excitedly exclaimed "half the class is here"!

I was slightly surprised when Lilly spotted a classmate and went running off calling their name, "Lane!  Lane!"  In these days of kids' names being ambiguous at times, I was expecting to see Lilly running toward a little girl.  But Lane turned out to be a boy, who is one of Lilly's classmates.  When I caught up to them a few moments later, Lilly introduced him to me as "This is my friend Lane, who's a boy"!  (And I thought to myself,' so Lilly means that in other words, he's a boy, and he's my friend, but he's not my boyfriend')!  I just laughed and said "well, that's OK"!  And it reminded me of myself growing up, with more boy-friends than girl-friends.  I guess Lilly takes that after me.  She's tomboyish enough to get along with the boys well, but girly enough to have fun with the girls too.

Here's Lilly riding the Mixer with Ethan (he's not in Lilly's class this year, but Lilly told me they were in the same 1st grade class together -- hee hee):

Then, a bunch of Lilly's girl-friends showed up, and they all had fun riding the rides together:

After riding the rides with her girl-friends for a while, Lilly met back up with a couple of her boy-friends from her class, and they all rode the Mixer together (with Lilly in the middle, of course):

I thought this was cute, so I zoomed in and snapped a picture, and it turned out to be my favorite picture I took during our whole time at the fair.  Hee hee!  It's so cute and funny!  Look at Lilly's expression, sitting there between those two boys!  Ha ha ha!:

Not long after this ride, the boys decided that they wanted to ride one of the more intense rides that Lilly doesn't like (and the boys ended up riding it over and over and over again), so Lilly had no choice but to ditch them to do other fun stuff.

It started getting late, and we'd been there for about 4 exhausting hours already.  Lilly wanted to play a game before we left, and I told her that the only kind of game she could play would have to be one that let you win a prize no matter what.  So she chose to do this 'whack the thingie with the hammer and make it ring the bell' game:

Lilly ended up throwing back that first inflatable toy hammer that she picked up.  And after a grueling eternity of sifting through the whole bin of giant inflatable hammers to pick out just the right one, we were finally able to persuade Lilly that it was time to go back home.

Sitting in the car, before we headed out, I took this picture of Lilly enjoying her fair-goodies:

Lilly actually found that wacky pair of light-up sunglasses laying on the ground next to the pig's pen at the petting zoo!  That kid finds more stuff than anybody I've ever seen!

Realizing that the glaring picture wouldn't do it justice, I took a little video so you could see Lilly's wacky glasses in action:

And after 4 fun (but exhausting) hours of enduring having to chase Lilly around all over the place while smelling a bad mixture of stale cologne, pony manure, and funnel cakes, that was our trip to the Fair!  :)