We visited our county fair on Tuesday night with two things in mind: eat some good food and register Avery for the fair’s annual baby contest.

After submitting her registration form, we started out with dinner in the cattle farmers’ tent then moved on to the popular FFA homemade ice cream. Here are Avery’s first tastes of the yummy, delicious treat.


She definitely liked it!

Next we moved on to the animal barns. Avery liked looking at all of the animals, although I’m sure she didn’t know what was going on.
We came up to a group of baby goats and the goats’ owner kindly offered to hold one up to Avery so she could pet it.

She did fine for a short time. The goat was very gentle and sweet and probably would have licked Avery if she had let him! Instead he was very patient and kind to her. But once she had enough, she was done. The goat’s owner apologized for upsetting her, but we explained that she’s like that with a lot of animals!

As we were walking around the fairgrounds, we heard over the loudspeaker that a tornado was sighted less than 7 miles from the fairgrounds. Then it started to rain. So we decided to run back to the car and head home.

Avery didn’t have any idea what was going on and actually liked see and feeling the rain. We safely made it home without seeing any tornados. It didn’t even look like the rain reached our house about 12 miles from the fairgrounds. And thank goodness there wasn’t any damage or injuries because of the tornado.

We returned to the fairgrounds yesterday for the baby contest.

We weren’t really sure what to expect. It was bloody hot and crowded in that arena. It turned out that there were more than 170 contestants in five categories, more than 50 in Avery’s age group alone.

Daddy decided to go on stage with Avery. That way if he knew any of the judges, she would get some extra points.

They took the contestants on stage in groups of ten. Each contestant had a short time to be in the spotlight at the front on the stage and show off for the judges.



A few of the princesses from the queen’s court were at the front of the stage to play with the contestants and distract them a little. So can you guess what Avery did? She waved, blew kisses and, of course, fist bumped the princesses.


After seeing all of the contestants in Avery’s category, the judges selected first, second and third place winners. The first place winner in each category was eligible for the grand champion.

Unfortunately, Avery didn’t place in her age group. We were a little disappointed with the way the contest was organized. Chris thought it would have been better to choose one person from each group of ten, then choose the top three from that smaller group. Plus, two of the three winners were dressed in costumes. We were expecting the judges to grade based on personality, not appearance. But we still had a good time!

Here is Avery’s participant ribbon. I guess that’s better than nothing, right!

And here’s the video, courtesy of Aunt Karen:

Tell me, how could the judges not think Avery is the cutest baby in Johnson County? :o)
Fun at the fair