One Day, Until Then: Fair Grove Fall Festival

Saturday was the 30th Annual Fair Grove Fall Festival. My mom and I plan around this every year. We get up early Saturday to join the other thousands of people to walk around and look at various craft booths and vendors. There is everything you can imagine that is homemade. This year we took the kids with intentions of spending the morning doing all the kids stuff and then taking them back home for naps and coming back that afternoon to volunteer picking up trash. During which the trash picking up time we would walk around and check out the booths and see if there was anything that caught our eye.

We did indeed do all the fun kid stuff in the morning. Jadon got his face painted with a big snake, Haven screamed when the lady came near her with the paint. Jadon rode the horses, twice, Haven screamed when she got in the fence with the horses. She loved the horses when there was a fence between them and her, but do not get her inside with them. Jadon walked around looking at the old tractors on display. He reminded me so much of my dad. My dad can walk around for hours looking at old cars and old tractors. I think Jadon stared at one tractor for 15 minutes. I had to explain to him that the nice rope they put around the tractor was their way of saying "do not touch". He so wanted to ride the thing.

That was the fun part. Then came the rest of the day. Our church thought it would be servants to the city of Fair Grove and volunteer to help with trash duty for free during the 2 day festival. My mom and I signed up for the afternoon shift. When we got there and learned of our duties and who else was there to serve and I realized this was not going to be as easy as I thought. Also, our duties were not to go around and pick trash off the ground, it was to empty the nasty trash bags out of the trash containers and take them to the biggest dumpsters I have ever seen. Thankfully we did have some men who could heave those bags up into the dumpsters. Our shift lasted 3 hours and we did not get a chance to look at those lovely booths that kept calling out our names. By the time I left I was exhausted, sweaty and regretting the fact that we chose to park in the free parking lot about 10 blocks away. It really wasn't 10, but it definately felt like it!

This poor horse at 9:00 in the morning looked like me at the end of my day. I don't think it could have held it's head up if you put a carrot in front of his face.