The Great Minnesota Get Together

Greetings from the Minnesota State Fair--honoring our agricultural roots, foods on a stick, and lots o' low-brow fun. As you can see EVERYONE comes out for the State Fair here in Minnesota. It really does offer an occasion to meander aimlessly through gargantuan veggie exhibits and mega-barns of farm animals, all while eating as much deep fried food as you can manage.

Of course, we did our best with the food--although I have to admit we've actually done better in previous years--I guess we were off our game last night--but here is the list of foods consumed:

• Deep fried cheese curds (kind of the official food of the state fair)
• Chocolate milkshake from the dairy barn
• Big cup of freshly made french fries
• Pork Chop on a stick (like half of the food is on a stick at the fair...)
• Elephant Ear
• Bomb Pop (for Juni)
• Freshly made lemondae
• Beer
• Hot Dog

Yeah, I'm not proud--mostly because our food list really isn't too long considering we were there for 5 hours. And my boy declared well into consuming all this food, "Mommy, my tummy hurts--I think I better eat some more cheese curds." That's what you call State Fair logic.
Then we spent lots of time visiting the Birth Center where you can see all sorts of farm animals giving birth live right there on the spot--pigs, cows, sheep--and chickens hatching from eggs. A pig was in labor while we there, but was a long way off from really delivering her piglets. But we did watch some video of one of the pigs giving birth earlier and when the vet reached inside her to pull one of the piglets out, my boy declared (with concern), "They're breaking the baby pigs out of the mommy!"

And there were lots of other animals there who had already given birth the previous day or earlier in the day. Like this little just-born calf that Juni spent lots of time gazing at.

Then made our way around the animal barns to look at sheep, chickens, bunnies...the inside of a silo (for us city-folk who have never seen the inside of a silo).
Haven't had enough? You can see more of our State Fair adventure here, at my Flickr site.