we are back...

We are home. What a great week at fair. We got all 5 pigs - excuse me- 4 pigs, Buzz, and Fairy Princess (the duck) loaded and taken into fair. Thank you Kerri... Addie and I couldnt have done it without you. I drove with Buzz in my trailer and prayed the whole way that I would get him there safely. He is Addie's baby after all. We got to the scales and realized that Buzz had layed on the duck cage during the trip which had pinned the duck to the floor of the cage. Close call!! 2 pigs made weight- so both kids had a market hog to sell!!!

Tuesday 12:00, we are checked into fair and the work begins. By the end of the day Addie and her friend Jesse had washed 7 pigs and body shaved 5. Noah began Wednsday off by winning GRAND CHAMPION duck (there was only 1) and then taking Grand Champion overall waterfowl. Molly was pretty proud that her duck already had 3 large purple ribbons and 1 trophy!!! By the end of fair the duck had 3 trophies and 7 ribbons. There will be no living with him in the barn now! When it came time for Molly to show her duck on Saturday, the judge couldn't get anywhere near her. Everytime he leaned in to talk to Molly, Fairy Princess would hiss and try to attack the judge. As long as he kept his distance from Molly everything was fine. Noah won Grand Champion showman and was able to participate in the small animal round robin tournament.

The kids did good. We didn't place so high with pigs this year, but learned alot... this new judge likes something completely different than the last judge... and luckily next year we will have another new one... so who knows. The kids had so much fun hanging out with their friends. The pig kids did a great job working together.

Addie ended up fairly sick... By day 2 we realized that she wasn't just working too hard in the heat and she wasn't just overly stressed. I checked her temp and found that she was running a temp of 102.5. There was no getting her out of the barn, although we did make her come back to the trailer for a little bit and her wonderful friends snuck back to the barn and snuck her pigs out for a bath. Even one of the boys who is too young to have a pig came up to me to tell me to not wake Addie in the morning for early morning chores. He said he would muck out her pig pens for her. How sweet is that? She stayed sick all week, but didn't stop. We went to the dr the day after fair and she had lost 5 lbs and they were threatening to put her in the hospital on IV fluids... some nasty virus (we jokingly said we thought she had the swine flu- sick joke I know). She seems to be over the hump now.

County Fair 2009 is over and we have to consider it a sucess. We came home with 2 pigs fewer than we went with and the same number of children...