I have this love for the state fair. For one, it’s usually an indicator that the heat of summer is over and fall is underway. For another: FOOD. I have a weakness for all of the fried, terrible foods.

(Except the Krispy Kreme burger. I’m sorry, but no. I love Krispy Kreme donuts, and I love sloppy joes, but put them together, and just the thought makes me want to hurl. I actually saw someone eat one of those and I couldn’t stop the involuntary gagging.)

Catie loves the state fair, and Lucy had never been before. This past Friday, the kids’ daycare was closed for a teacher workshop day, and it was Catie’s last day of her track-out break (she started her 2nd term of first grade today). So since I had no childcare options, I decided to take the day off work and take the kids to the fair.

And this is where I learned two major down sides of taking a two year-old to the state fair:

* The stroller. OMG the stroller. The fair is far too big and spread out to NOT bring the stroller, and it is damn near impossible to navigate the crowd WITH the stroller. I usually have a “bob and weave” approach to crowds, I like to move quickly to get where I need to go. Pushing a 30-pound toddler with a 20-pound backpack (supplies for the day) in the storage compartment makes it impossible to move at anything other than a snail’s pace.

* The rides. I didn’t realize this, but all of the rides, even the tiny baby rides, all have minimum height requirements. So we go to the Kiddie Land part of the fair (because Catie is a chicken about rides and won’t do anything too adventurous or scary anyway), and they both see this ride that is basically five little boats that go around in a circle at about 4 miles an hour.

Like this:

So they both see it, and they’re both, “BOATS!!” Ok then. We get in the line for the boat ride, and when we get to the front, the ticket lady points at Lucy and says, “She’s too little.” Wait, what? This is one of the most babyish of baby rides! How can my ginormous toddler be too little for it?

Because the minimum height is 36 inches. And Lucy is maybe 33 inches tall at the most.

So Catie got on the ride and Lucy cried, “Boats! BOOOOOOOOATS!” the whole time. It was pretty awful.

(And I mean… seriously? Look how HUGE Catie is on that ride? It was DESIGNED. FOR. TODDLERS. WTF, fair people?)

That continued for pretty much the rest of the day. Lucy could only go on the rides where I could go with her (so, the merry-go-round and spinning teacups and things like that), and she sobbed and wailed for all of the rides that she couldn’t go on. I felt awful for her.

[Aside: one of the rides that Lucy and I did together? Was a little mini-ferris wheel shaped like a fire truck. Lucy freaking LOVED it, and it scared the crap out of me. I am not a fan of heights. And Catie takes after me in this regard, because she stayed on the ground with Chris while Lucy and I rode the fire truck, and looked at us like we were crazy.]

On Saturday, Chris was going to the fair with his kids and his two nieces, and we decided to drop Lucy with my parents so Catie and I could go to the fair to meet up with them. I felt bad leaving Lucy, but she loves getting her grandparents’ attention all to herself, and I figured that I was saving us all a lot of frustration by not bringing her. No stroller, no worries about height requirements, we’re good to go.

(For the record, that boat picture above is from Saturday. I didn’t take any pictures at the fair on Friday when I was trying to comfort Lucy the whole time.)

So! Me, Chris, and 5 (count ’em) kids at the fair. Although, his nieces are 11 and 12 years old and they’re SO well-behaved, there wasn’t really much supervision needed there at all.

Catie really likes Chris’s kids a lot, and she seemed to like the nieces too, but the problem was that the other 4 kids are a lot braver than she is about trying new things, so while Catie would’ve been happy to stay in Kiddie Land the whole time, the others were wanting to go on rides with names like the Ring of Fire and the Zipper.

I talked Catie into going on the Tilt-a-Whirl with me. It was one of my favorite rides as a kid, and I figured, hey, it’s not scary, right? It just spins you around, but it’s not like it involves heights or flips you upside down or anything.

I took a selfie of us right before the ride started.

Ok, so I forgot that the Tilt-a-Whirl kinda sucks. Catie screamed, “OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OHHHH MYYYY GODDDDD MOOOOOOMMMMMMYYYYYY!!!!” the whole time. (Note that she NEVER says “oh my god,” ever, it’s usually “oh my gosh,” so this was basically my kid’s version of major profanity.) I held onto her tightly and kept laughing the whole time so she’d think it was ok, but seriously? I was ready for the ride to be over after the first 30 seconds.

When it was over, she said that she hated it and she was never going to trust me ever again about trying new rides. Fair enough, kiddo, I’ll be ok if I never go on the Tilt-a-Whirl again either.

I told her that I was proud of her for trying it, even though she hated it, because that’s what life’s all about: you try new things. Sometimes you find something you love, sometimes you find out that it’s something you hate, and you never have to do it again. But at least you’ve tried it, so you KNOW.

It started to rain on us before we left the fair on Saturday, but we didn’t really mind it all that much, and overall it was a really great day.

Hopefully next year, when Lucy is a little bit taller and we don’t rely on the stroller as much, it’ll be even better.

Catie has a lot of nerdy “gamer girl” tendencies. And honestly, I’m ok with that. For a while, I was concerned because it seemed like she didn’t have any other little girl friends at school. She says that the other girls “only want to play dumb princesses.” And while Catie will watch a Disney princess movie if it happens to be on TV, she has no other interest in princesses or fairies or Barbie dolls or anything like that.

Case in point: in the movie about Rapunzel, “Tangled”? Her favorite character is Maximus the horse. (I’m personally partial to Pascal the chameleon, but that’s just me.)

More for her Geek Street Cred: the past year, she’s seen all six Star Wars movies. It started off with the original trilogy, which I owned on DVD, because hi, I’m a nerd and that’s my childhood right there. Then she wanted to see the other three movies, and I kind of hemmed and hawed, because, frankly, those movies just aren’t very good. And Episode III (when Anakin becomes Darth Vader) is pretty violent and dark. But she begged and pleaded, and I found out you can buy episodes 1-3 on DVD for less than $30 on Amazon (which should be a good indicator of just how beloved those movies are by the general public, which is to say NOT AT ALL), and I caved. She loved all of them.

[Allow me to insert an aside here on how rage-filled the ending of Episode III makes me. Padme is in labor with the twins, Luke and Leia, and she’s dying of “a broken heart”?? Seriously? The robot-doctor says she’s just lost the will to live. And oh well, that’s that, nothing they can do. OH REALLY, PADME?! So the guy you married turned out to be nothing like who you thought he was? Yeah, you’re the first person that’s ever happened to, in the history of forever. How tragic for you. Now suck it up, get your sad mopey ass off that sterile delivery table, and go get a damn job because you have two kids to raise. For the love of the Force, George Lucas, HIRE BETTER WRITERS.]

*ahem* Sorry. Needed to get that off my chest.

Anyway, Catie now draws the characters whenever they have “free art” time at school. It’s pretty amazing.

But to continue on that whole “not wanting to play dumb princesses” thing – Catie doesn’t even want to pretend to be Princess Leia, who is actually kind of a bad-ass. (She shoots stormtroopers! She strangled Jabba the Hutt with a chain!) If she’s playing Star Wars, she wants to be… Chewbacca. Yeah, I don’t know.

And hey, I consider myself a nerdy type, and I think it’s awesome that she does her own thing. But I really did wring my hands and fret that she was going to be lonely and friend-less through school. Then, one of the other moms pointed out, “she’s going to grow up with a hundred big brothers, she’s going to be fine.” And it’s true, she plays really well with the other little boys. As long as they’re kind of nerdy little boys who don’t expect her to play sports.

(Chris’s take on this: “She is going to grow up to break a lot of geeks’ hearts.” Which is sweet, and he might just be right on that one, who knows.)

Anyway, for the past year or so, Catie’s other major passion has been the Skylanders video game. She got it last Christmas and she’s been in love with it ever since then. She has a ton of the action figures, she has dog tag necklaces with the different characters printed on them, she takes her Skylanders backpack to school every day, and she also sketches pictures of them (which are comparable to the Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader picture above – she really makes them detailed and it’s pretty amazing work for a 6 year-old).

And really… it’s fine. At first I was a little concerned that maybe the game was too violent for her, but it’s really not, and there’s a decent amount of strategy that has to be applied in order to play the game successfully. I wouldn’t necessarily call it educational, but it’s not damaging either. I mean, it’s not like she’s playing Mortal Kombat or Grand Theft Auto, you know?

Lately she’s been watching movies about the various Skylanders characters on YouTube, and sometimes she comes across mash-up videos like this:

So she’s now asking me to put some of these songs — like “Numb” by Linkin Park and “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence — on her iPad. And… I mean. I guess it’s fine? There’s nothing obscene about the songs, certainly. But DANG they’re a little dark for a 6 year-old, no?

I kind of can’t decide if it’s cute or disturbing when I hear my first grader singing lines like, “wake me up inside, call my name, and save me from the dark.” It’s just… odd.

(Also, too bad Catie wasn’t around in the 90s, since she’s apparently a big fan of that music era.)

I hope this doesn’t come off like me worrying (or worse, complaining) about her. I celebrate all of her little quirks and odd passions, because they are what makes her my Catie. Sort of like the fact that since she was three years old, she’s been saying she wants to be a paleontologist when she grows up. It’s weird (why dinosaurs? Where did she even pick up on that?), but it’s also fantastic.

And I do fully realize that this is a fluke. Lucy, at two, is already gravitating toward pink EVERYTHING and talks about princesses already. I predict she’s going to be my girly-girl. Which is also totally fine! It’s just funny to me how each kid develops their own “thing” over time, and we really have no major influence on how they turn out. Just luck of the draw. But either way — tomboy-ish sci-fi loving video gamer chick or puffy pink tutu-wearing frilly girl — they’re still the most amazing little people I’ve ever met in my life.