2008 Utah State Fair Extravaganza!

We have a Benson family tradition of going to the State Fair every year - and we have been at it for over 30 years!! We LOVE the fair! It all starts at the Brighton Bank parking lot where parking is still a cheap $5, a lot of us park there, in fact I have even received birthday presents in the parking lot. The fair is usually around my birthday and sometimes we've been lucky to go on my birthday, what a great present! This year we had every one but our Dublin kids :( we missed them!

I downloaded these photos out of order and it takes way to long for me to move them around, so please enjoy this random sampling our our 2008 adventure at the fair:

Max rode out with me and we were hanging out waiting for everyone else to arrive, as you can see Max loves to climb and was busy on the fence that surrounded these giant cats:

Yeah that's right TIGERS at the fair, you have got to be kidding me!! Not just one either, there were three in this tiny cage and about 4 or 5 others in even smaller cages. This poor guy just kept pacing back and forth, back and forth. They do shows with them in the evening, we didn't stick around.

Janetha loves the fair too! There are way too many photo opps for her and we usually try out all of them, however, the line for the cute piggy, goat and cow was too long with babies and toddlers!!
Luke hung out in his stroller most of the night, he was cute when he saw the goats and the baby pigs!
Here is Maxwell getting a ride from his dad, this was near the end of our night and we had done plenty of walking......no one offered me their shoulders to sit on!

Randy loves to eat and especially at the fair! This was his "after" dinner snack!

One of the things we ALWAYS do is the BIG YELLOW SLIDE, wahoo!! I always try to get all of us lined up together in an organized manner for a perfect photo......wow this is the best I could do! All of the kiddos love the slide, old and young.


I would love to have a tractor like this someday, really, isn't it the cutest thing?! Since Janetha and I have been working hard on Body for Life, my muscles are not cooperating with me, hence the awful grimace as I try to get down off the tractor! haha
Ohhh, here they are, the darling baby pigs! A little bigger than other years but they were so funny chasing each other around the pen while the mom just lies there ignoring them all!!

I'm sure these two little guys were suffocating as they tried to get a bit more nourishment!!
Izzy loves to be on her dad's shoulders. This was a bit of a problem because she latched on to this bar while looking at the piggys and would not let go!! I have a few other photos of Doug trying to walk away but Izz was bound and determined to hang on tight!!

The bunnies have been a favorite of mine. Probably because they usually have the giant gray lop eared bunnies that remind me of our cat Blue.......I know that probably is hard for most to imagine, but trust me on this one! Well no huge blues this time, but we found some other cuties instead!
Look at these darling triplets!! I think we should name them Sofi, Lucy and Kaylee, they were just so cute and snuggly!!

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Superman......not quite but it was a lot of parachutists, and they got most everyone's attention.

In the first exhibit building we go through there is always a butter sculpture. This year the sculptor decided to do something a little more "out" there and the photo below is what the butter sculture ended up being. When Max and I arrived he was still working on it and then when we left he had just finished it. We talked to him for a few minutes and he told us the dog on the left was supposed to be a weiner dog, but he wanted a dog with more spunk and class so he changed it to a basset hound - modeled after Randy the Dog I am sure!!

Well there you have it, our night at the State Fair. We all felt a lot like Izzy, tired and ready to go home to bed!!