I love going to the fair. Not the state fair, with hundreds of thousands of people and big name musical acts on stage, but the small home-town Union Fair, held each August in Union, Maine. There are chickens,
sheep... 
pigs...
and cows
from local farms competing for prizes, ox and antique tractor pulls, greasy and sticky sweet fair food, the demolition derby, and of course amusement park rides - the kind your mother wouldn’t let you go on as a child because they didn’t look safe.
We have been attending this fair since we only had 2 children, which goes back 5-6 years, always letting the kids have 1 day to get bracelets so they can ride as many times as their stomach will allow. Every year there are the old favorites such as the carousel, the giant slide, and the fun house, new ones such as the Speedway, and surprisingly the “Spooky Ride” returned from a 2 year hiatus to the older children’s delight. Poor Timmy wasn’t tall enough to ride anything but the motorcycles that went round-and-round , but he enjoyed his 2 turns so much that I had to pry his little hands off the chrome handlebars.
7 hours might seem to be plenty of time to see all the sights, but it comes too quickly for little ones. Despite the howls of protest I knew I had picked a good time to go when I looked in the rear view mirror a few miles outside of town and saw 5 snoring children slumped over the seats of the van. By the time we got back to the house it was pitch dark and I had to shake both Will and Mary hard to get them to wake up long enough to climb the stairs and get into their jammies.
I was proud of my crew, they were well behaved and responsible for each other so there were no temper tantrums or frantic searches for lost children. In fact, since they were so good I promised a return on Saturday for the pedal tractor races, the parade, and another shot at the free bicycle raffle.
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