sunday at the fair

 Sometimes Will and I, especially I, get so caught up in renovating that we forget to stop and play as a family. The kids are generally so happy to stay at home and run wild in the woods, which makes it all to easy to spend our whole weekend working working working. And that's great in it's way, but it's also something we have to watch, because otherwise we miss the fun things that are going on around us.

So, on Sunday, even though we had still not ripped out the carpet upstairs, hadn't finished cleaning up the yard and had a 3/4 painted upstairs bathroom, we set off for the Tunbridge Worlds Fair.

I love fairs. Not the rides particularly and not the midway at all. But I love the animals and the blue ribbon jams and the decorated vegetables. The old timey things. Which Tunbridge had, along with, of course, the rides and games. And also a cow standing in the river. I'm not sure why, but no one else seemed to think that was strange.

But they also had antique farm machines shooting corn and splitting logs and spinners spinning flax and wool and people in costume roasting chickens over a fire and wooden water pipes being drilled. The kids sat in the old schoolhouse and wrote on slates. We drank freshly pressed apple cider and bought candy from the general store. There was a surrey, with a fringe on top (no, really, but the upholstery was black on this one) And we went on the Ferris Wheel, all together. I'll take that over ripping up carpet any day.