State Fair, Sacramento

I love fairs, I really do. We used to go to the NC state fair every year and loved it. Since I've moved to SF, I've always wanted to make the trek up to Sacramento to the CA stat fair. Since I had such success with the kids on outings thus far in our summer, I thought I would give it a shot. I talked to my friend Emily in Sac, who has 4 year old triplets and they go every year, to see if it's something I could handle on my alone with the twins. She gave me a few pointers, worked her schedule out to meet us there and we were off! Timo and Cameron were excited to see their old pals Fletcher, Baily and Parker!

My favorite part of fairs are the exhibits.  We stumbled on the Chevy car exhibit as soon as we walked in the door.  A good 15mins of climbing in and out of cars and Timo spotted Bumblebee!  They has the official Transformer car and Timo loved it!  Good memory from watching Transformers with his Daddy this summer.

And I love all the expos halls!  A great SunMaid  raisin display giving out free boxes of raisins (oh yeah, I love all the free stuff you get too), games to play to win more raisins and fun pictures to take.  We walked out with about 10 boxes of raisin for snack the rest of the day...score!

Emily directed us toward the toy expo hall...oh boy, Timo was in heaven!  Trains, Transformers, Star Wars...these don't include all the Lincoln logs and  legos!

The Kapic kids then took us over the Midieval expo which was full of magic, wizards, spells and sounds of the time.  The giant bubble pool was a fav in here.  Cameron also took her turn in the "hang from the arrow" contest.  They had a timer to see how long you could hang.  She did pretty good...

We stopped at the Smokey the Bear fire safety area for a snack and say good bye to our Kapic friends.  They needed to go but Emily laid out the rest of the fair for us, pointing out the "must see" sections.

After snacks and goodbyes, we took the fire safety class from Smokey the Bear which meant going to different rooms learning about, you guessed it, fire safety.

We kept running into all kinds of animals, all day long!

Emily said we had to go to the farm section and pet the fish.  How often do you get to pet a fish??!!

We spent a good part of our afternoon in The Farm.  There were real garden there so the children could see what the veggie plant looked like, farm animals, a "be a farmer" section with milking cows, lassos, raking hay and driving tractors.  We had to do it all!

We topped off our farm visit with a fresh picked peach!

Then it was over the arts and craft table where Cameron made a butterfly mask and Timo made a fish hat.  It took a LONG time to make these because we were right next to the horses.  Each time a new horse came walking by, all work stopped.  But it was nice to have a cool, shaded place to just sit for a while and rest.

We finished just in time to catch a horse show, which was so cool.  Then we walked around looking and petting all the horses and playing the kids horse area.  All things horses, Cameron was in heaven.

After hitting all the exhibits and animals, I couldn't put off the rides and games much longer.  The great thing about this fair was the separate "kids midway".  Much smaller and more manageable for little ones.  I told the kids they could ride 5 rides and play 2 games which was perfect because they were only tall enough for 5 of the rides.  So odd that most of the rides came from Michael Jackson's ranch....only in CA, huh.  And we picked out two games that "everyone is a winner" so they would walk away with something...little did I know Timo would win the biggest prize!  He and Cameron did really well at the game and both won big..a whale and a shark!  Gotta love the Midway!

I can't express enough how well Cameron and Timo were behaving.  They were listening, following directions, staying close to Mommy and no real tantrums.  So when it was getting time to leave I let them pick out two more special things they wanted to do.  Cameron chose a piece of bubble gum from this gum ball machine and Timo wanted to "ride" on the foot massage machine.

Our last treat that we had been saving till the very end was riding the monorail.  We had been watching it go by all day long so there was a lot of anticipation built up....so exciting.  we rode at the perfect time too, the sun was setting and the lights of the big Midway were just coming on.

I had planned on leaving around 5pm but we were having so much fun, we ended up staying till almost 9!  We only left they because it was getting dark and Cameron thought fireworks would start when it got dark.  (Not really but she has this HUGE fear of fireworks and thinks they always go off at fairs).  I was thinking ahead and brought the kids jammies with us.  A quick change in the parking lot, a drive thru at the chick-fil-a for some sweet tea for Mommy, and we were heading home.  The kids barely made it onto the freeway before they were out!  Sometimes I regret taking the risk of doing something "big" and other times, like this one, the risk pays off.  What an amazing time we had!!  Next year we're bringing Daddy with us!