A Decade at the Fair
From the time I was eight until I was eighteen, I did 4-H. Every summer I basically lived at the fair for a week: up early, animals fed, showmanship clothes pressed, workbooks turned in. Ten years of it. I loved every muddy minute.
The Small Animals
My category was small animals, which for me meant a rotating barnyard of poultry and rabbits. Over the years I raised chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, and at various points guineas and pigeons. My specialities were Partridge Silkies and Call Ducks, the two I knew best and loved most. I also showed Columbian Wyandottes and Mille Fleur, and for rabbits I raised a lot of Jersey Woolies and Netherland Dwarfs.
I did meat pen every year, and I did showmanship, which was my favorite. Showmanship is not about having a flawless animal, it is about knowing your animal inside and out and handling it calmly and kindly in front of a judge. I won a lot of grand champions and reserve champions over those years, and I am proud of them, because every ribbon was earned.
And the work was daily. I cleaned pens every single day. I fed and watered, I groomed, I bathed animals before shows. I went to weekly club meetings where I stood up and presented my projects, and I volunteered for fairground cleanups. As I got older I mentored the younger 4-Hers coming up behind me, which, looking back, is probably where my love of teaching started. None of it was glamorous, and all of it was the point. The ribbons were just the part people could see.
The Home Show, Where I Went a Little Overboard
4-H is not only animals. There is a whole home show side, and I fell for that just as hard. One of its awards is the 4-Star 4-Her, which you can only earn every few years because you sit a year out in between. I earned it twice. That was not luck, it was the payoff of a lot of projects and a lot of hours.
I will admit I went a little overboard. I sewed shirts. I built a blue gun cabinet. I made a mosaic on a fountain. I grew fairy gardens, and I took grand champion in cake decorating. Each one is its own project with a workbook you fill out, where you write down your goals, your process, your costs, and what you learned. I had stacks of those workbooks, and every result on that list came from filling out every page.
What It Actually Taught Me
People hear 4-H and picture farm kids and prize ribbons, and sure. But look at what it quietly drilled into me. Every project is documented in a workbook, so I have been keeping project journals since I was in elementary school. Showmanship is presenting your work with confidence to a judge, which is not that different from standing next to a research poster explaining my thesis. Meat pen and animal care taught me responsibility for living things on a daily schedule with no days off.
The website you are reading is, in a very real way, a 4-H project. I set goals, I did the work, I documented every piece of it, and now I am showing it to you. Ten years at the fair built the person who builds like this. I would not trade it for anything.