Katie goes to the fair!

Katie met Big Tex last week at the Texas State Fair. For as long as I've known Peter, he's been telling me stories about the fair and Big Tex and how he lost a tooth in a corn dog. So of course we had to take Katie this year. My urban daughter was particularly facinated by the younger girls showing their cows (I believe it was called "Youth Beef Heifers"). Katie thought this was the neatest thing and sat watching in the stands for quite a while. She even suggested that she'd like to do that when she was bigger. I told her that moving to Texas was about as rural as we were going to get. And she also loved watching the cow be milked. Peter asked her a great question, "Do you think the milk is warm or cold?" And you can guess that she thought it was cold until we explained it to her.

The fair was a combination of livestock and rural things and a carnival. Katie had heard stories from her friend Matthew at school that there was lots of candy, so she wanted all the treats we passed by. Of course having lived in Manhattan the last 7 years I looked at the fair food and just thought "street fair - ugh." It was really the same fried food you get at street fairs in NYC. We did try the chicken friend bacon and Katie was correct when she reported "it tasted just like chicken fingers."

It was a fun day and Katie still talks about feeding the baby animals with a shovel and how some of them didn't belong there (the more exotic non-farm creatures). And she talks about Big Tex and how he was really tall and sometimes talks and waves a little bit. And she proudly points him out on the ads for the fair we see.

Big Tex - The Texas State Fair mascot/icon. He's 54 feet tall. I think he looks dated, but I guess everyone ages.