You might be a 4-H Fair Mom if...

1. The day after the goat show, you can't find your hairbrush. After much searching, you find it in the barn with the tack, where some Kid-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named borrowed it because "I needed to brush Amelia the Goat's tail and I couldn't find her grooming tool!"

2. You are fairly certain the only vegetable your kids have had this week is actually grain, when they ate fresh corn on the cob at a fair dinner. You also know the only fruit they have eaten this week is a "cherry" sno-cone.

3. Your kitchen looks like a tornado blew through it because your 4-H foods kids needed to bake "one more loaf of bread" right before judging, and you haven't been home to clean it since flying out the door with the still-warm loaf on a paper plate inside a plastic bag, hoping that when the judge cut into it there wouldn't be tunnels.

4. You privately disagreed with the judge who said your daughter's apple pie wasn't "soft" enough because you prefer a little crunch to your apples, but you didn't say this out loud to her face. Instead, you smiled and nodded, and agreed to help your daughter microwave those apples before baking them next time -- crossing your fingers as you said it because of course you never intend to do this.

5. Your daughter had to accept horsemanship awards in her pajamas, because when the awards were given out, she was already dressed in the pajama pants she made for the sewing project in order to model them in the Style Revue.

6. Your phone says it is out of memory, thanks to the 6,528 photos you took of your kids doing, making, showing, cleaning, growing, and going during fair week and the week before.

7. Your feet are so swollen from sleeping upright in a vehicle seat all night, watching the rabbit barn, that you can barely walk to the bathrooms -- only to find the bathroom locked.

8. You find yourself setting up a tent at 11:30 p.m. on a Wednesday night because the forecaster said there might be storms tonight and you don't dare leave the fairgrounds in case you need to move your animals.

8. You have been saving beer bottles and water bottles for weeks for the horticulture display at the fair.

9. Tuesday: "Five dollars for a funnel cake? They have got to be kidding."
Friday: "I give in. I need a funnel cake."

10. You never have to explain to  your kids that the world isn't fair. They learned that on their own when their friend made $450 on her red ribbon cookies, and they made $75 on their purple ribbon decorated cake. Never think that good life lessons aren't learned through disappointment!

11. You know that stock trailers can haul horses, cows, and other large livestock, but they can also haul small animals, serve as dressing rooms when getting ready for a show, and even serve as a makeshift camper with an air mattress or sleeping bags.

12. You write a check to 4-H Council one day for $25, thinking that will be plenty to cover three days' worth of drinks and snacks using the concession stand punch cards -- and find yourself writing a similar check the next day because the kids were hungry and thirsty all.day.long.

13. Your kids have learned that it is possible to be an expert in a lot of different areas, as they had the same judge for their rockets, gardening, crops, woodworking, and entomology projects. They also had the same judge for their style revue and arts and crafts projects -- on different days!

14. The only times this week you have seen your husband, the 4-H Fair Dad, is catching a
glimpse of him cooking hamburgers for a fair dinner, or loading livestock in the trailer.

15. All of this craziness is worth it when you see the leadership skills your kids are gaining, and you watch them teach fair visitors of all ages, 0-100, about their projects. Their pride in their work makes you proud!

16. At the end of fair week, this may be a tempting reward...

... but instead, you settle for this one:

4-H Achievement Reception

The H-Troop kids did very well in their 2007-08 4-H year. Hope, Hannah and Noah all qualified for the Achievement Trip -- which is limited to the top six kids point-wise in each age division. (Hope and Hannah are intermediates; Noah is a junior). Kids earn points through project talks, participation in countywide and statewide events, project book awards, fair entries, community service and other activities. 

Project awards are based on 4-H project record books. They got these awards today.

Hope was a County Award winner in:

Overall Family Living

Overall Natural Resources

Overall Animal Sciences

Horse

Rabbit

Photography

She was a County Champion in

Overall Individual and Community Resources

Overall Plant & Mechanical

Dog

Arts & Crafts

Citizenship

Leadership

Reading

Shooting Sports

Clothing & Textiles

Hannah was a County award winner in:

Overall Animal Science

Overall Individual & Community Resources

Overall Plant and Mechanical Sciences

Overall Family Living

Arts & Crafts

Reading

Shooting Sports

Wildlife

Horse

She was County Champion in:

Plant Science

Entomology

Cat

Rabbit

Geology

Heritage Arts

Overall Natural Resources

Hope and Hannah also earned the 4-H Emerald Award. Noah earned the Bronze Award.

Mum gardenHannah helped me plant some mums and some perennial shrubbery yesterday. She's turning into a pretty good little horticulturist, though her first love remains animals (and specifically, rabbits).

Sidenote ... anyone else remember Chuck Taylor Converse hightops? My kids are all crazy about them. I have no idea why. If only I still had my pair from junior high basketball to give the girls.

The H-Troop String Section

Hope and Noah began taking violin lessons four weeks ago. They are enjoying it a lot, and their instructor has invited all parents to bring a violin and learn along with the kids if we want ... so I am going to get to do that! I haven't taken a violin lesson since I was 7 and started to learn from an elderly fiddle player in my hometown. He was a very nice man.

I have to lose five of my fingernails (well, down to the shortest length possible, anyway) but hopefully it will be worth it.

Stumping for Grandma

Hope, Hannah, Noah, Elizabeth, Ainsley and I went to my hometown to campaign for my mom's County Commissioner election bid. The kids did a great job knocking on doors and handing out pamphlets about her, and asking people to Vote for Grandma Wilma. Hey, citizenship in action!

I love high school football.

I love royal blue and white.

I love the Wildcats.
Ainsley loved the Wildcat cheerleaders.
We all loved the blur of blue.

Why in the world do I have football pictures here? The kids and I went to my hometown football game, starring my alma mater Wildcats. It was COLD. We could see our breaths by the fourth quarter. But it was so much fun!
The uniforms are slightly different 21 years later, but yet it all felt very familiar.
Noah ran into his buddy from the fair, Joshua -- son of one of my high school classmates. They had a great time not watching the game.
With 9 minutes left in the THIRD quarter, this was the score. We left at the start of the 4th quarter with the Cats up 52-20, because it was COLD and Ainsley was freezing. 

I miss my hometown!

First home

On my way to my hometown recently, I drove a little out of the way to get a glimpse of -- and show the kids -- the first home Mark and I lived in when we got married. It was this farmhouse 13 miles from the nearest town, now barely visible from the road for the beautiful trees the new owner planted, but relatively unchanged on the outside.

It was a great house. The walls were 18 inches thick stone, with stucco over them. It was a two-story house with Cape Cod-style dormer windows on the second story, and we loved living there. It was a great start to marriage, because it was remote enough that we had no television signal, an unreliable radio signal, and no neighbors for miles. We deepened our friendship those months living in that house, and learned to share some interests and make our own entertainment.

We both miss the country.
This is the view from slightly southeast of the farm. Our bloodhound Shiloh loved this place. He loved to sit up on the hill and howl at the cattle.

I don't miss mowing the yard, though. 
I thought I'd give the kids a mini-tour of my life after college, too. This is the first house I lived in when I graduated from college and moved to S-town to become a newspaper editor. It was tiny. It was back in an alley. The rent was $150 a month plus bills -- and I could barely afford that. Journalism pay stinks. 

At any rate, it was a cozy first home for me. I had great neighbors. In fact, a childhood friend (we met at 4-H camp and remained in touch via a series of coincidental mutual friends through college) also lived in the alley that first summer -- he, too, was finished with college, ready to be out on his own, and didn't want to live with his parents ... so he lived in their travel trailer in their back yard. :) Our "homes" were just across the alley from one another.
That first house did grow rather cramped quickly, and I moved up to this three-bedroom home. It was $200 a month, which I eked out somehow for the extra space. And it was somewhat cuter in my memory, since I had the porch decorated, had planted grass, and had a big tree in the front yard that some subsequent owner removed. When I lived there it was beige with brown trim.

The main thing I remember about this house was how cold the bedrooms and bathroom were in the winter. The only source of heat was a "Warm Morning" gas stove in the living room. Brrr, was that bathroom cold with no heat in it. I lived here until the week before Mark and I got married, when we moved all of our belongings into the farmhouse pictured at the start of this post, and I headed to my parents' house to prepare for the wedding while he lived at the farm and worked until the day before we got married.

I'm rambling. But I think this will all interest my kids someday. And maybe I'll forget more details, so I'd better write it down now.
This was my first office. The window on the right was mine; my desk was right there and I sat with my back to the window, which was just a few feet from a very busy U.S. Highway 50. This was the newspaper office, though it isn't any longer. But I spent many more hours living in this building than I ever did in either of the above houses. Small town newspaper editors rarely get to go home.

October garden update

The zinnias are in bloom, and are lovely! Butterflies swarm the marigolds, zinnias and mums daily. Hannah's entomology collection is growing daily.

Stay tuned for my pride and joy near the end ... I still haven't figured out how to move photos around, so it got buried.

First, the failures. It wouldn't be an honest update without the failures.

I have no cucumber photos, because they were a complete loss. Everything from a mess of aphids to some sort of blossom end rot plagued the cukes, and they took the cantaloupe right along with them. Out they went to be burned. Out, out, darned spot!
The patio tomatoes failed miserably. The wind was not kind to them. We have harvested a few meager tomatoes from them, but they are pathetic.
Big plans, small follow-through. Remember the herb/rhubarb garden? Here sits the frame and some of the soil amendments. Maybe it will get planted next spring.
But the tomatoes! From four tomato plants -- one Celebrity and three Roma -- we have harvested dozens and dozens and dozens of tomatoes. I have SO many green ones now. We're crossing our fingers that it doesn't freeze soon ... though that would help get rid of the flies. Tough call. I hate the flies.
These are marigolds that Hannah started from seed and then transplanted into the square-foot garden plot. They took over the garden. They are HUGE. They shadowed the onions, they shadowed the jalapenos, and they shadowed the bush beans so badly I had to give them a mercy killing. But they are proudly orange and beautiful, and attract monarchs, so we're enjoying them nonetheless.
Mums! I love chrysanthemums. Is there a more perfect flower? I have to admire a flower that keeps coming back no matter how badly I treat it.
Dollar General has cute little scarecrows. I couldn't resist a few for the garden.
Hannah's succulents barrel has gone wild. I don't even know what this thing is, but it has babies. The hens and chicks are multiplying as well. I think we'll need another barrel next spring.
Ah, my baby. My pride and joy. This is one of two gorgeous eggplants that are merrily purpling up my garden. At the first sign of frost I'll harvest them, size be darned, but I'm hoping they grow another inch or two first. They look huge in this photo, but are only about 5.5 inches long.
A bounty of peppers and tomatoes ...
Carrots that are ready to harvest. The rabbits really love the tops!
A simple addition of some fertilizer made all of my annual flowers, which I thought were done-for in early August, start growing and blooming vigorously again. My planter boxes are all a riot of color.

In what is becoming an annual tradition, the kids and I took a beautiful fall afternoon off and headed for the zoo. My amiable subjects posed for new portraits for Daddy's office. Above, Hope -- age 12, 7th grade, clarinet player, babysitter extraordinaire, and Jonas Brothers fan.
Hannah, age 10 (11 in a month), 5th grade, starting to play the flute, rabbit lover, entomologist, geologist, and Jonas Brothers fan.
Noah, age 9, 3rd grader, and lover of all that is NASCAR, Hot Wheels, monster truck, or dinosaur-related. He is not a fan of the Jonas Brothers.
Elizabeth, age 6. 1st grader, and Dad's best horse-chores pal. Loves horses, cats, tormenting cats, loving and hugging cats, and chasing cats. Oh, and the Jonas Brothers.
Ainsley, age 3, preschooler, bossy, determined, and lover of all things Noggin. Is undecided about the Jonas Brothers.