Off to the Ex we went, on a fine cloudy and cool weekday.
M, having been last year with my dad and me, was in pursuit of two things:
1. Candy apple
2. Cotton candy
D and I of course were using the kid as an excuse to go on rides and eat fudge. So after we acquired a near-neon-red candy apple for M*, we ambled around the kiddie midway (which is hidden away up by Dufferin Gate) and went on rides for a time, fed llamas and chickens at the petting zoo, and then got hungry.
The Food Building, for the uninitiated, is an enormous building full of food stalls, rather like a multi-ethnic food court on steroids. It is full of the greasy comestibles of fifty+ cultures and was probably more thrilling back when gyros were considered exotic. Now, I can get most of those fifty cultures’ munchables within three blocks of my office. But anyway.
M, upon encountering the fantastic greasy madness:
Where’s the fruit? I just want some fruit!
Weird kid. But we did manage to find her a smoothie. Smoothie for kid : fudge for me. You wouldn’t think that would be considered fair, would you?
We wandered through the horse palace, looking for the horse show, again wondering how on earth we managed to house many many people with rifles in there during WWII without causing some sort of deadly mass breakdown, then kept wandering and happened upon the huge convention centre spaces full of stuff for sale.
I did not know the Ex was a shopping destination. But vast hot tubs with built-in stereos and rainbow LED lighting effects were selling at deep discounts and some had sold, so there you go.
The horse show was full, so we headed out to see the Army display. D admired the massive vehicles. I admired the shiny-buff Army folks and wondered if they picked particularly good-looking folks to staff the show. M showed a small blister on her hand to a guy manning an armored vehicle. (He got over his surprise quickly and was suitably sympathetic.)
We found the height restrictions on the main Midway to be much less serious than the online list indicated, which was a happy thing. 
M takes after me on rides: we look at some spinning/lurching/bouncing ride and think “Hey cool! Maybe it goes upside down!” D, on the other hand, thinks about metal fatigue. So we all went on the swing, M shouting “TOTALLY AWESOME” at random intervals and D looking vaguely ill. D and I took it in turns to go on some of the other rides: I refuse to do log rides (don’t know why I hate them but I do) so he did that one and I — at M’s insistence — did the one where it spins around so fast that you’re stuck to the wall and the floor falls away (oof).
Then (at M’s insistence, and because it was raining) we went to the IAMS Superdogs show.
Oh man. The cheesy lameness. Dogs! Running the same brief and not-hard obstacle course about ten times! Then some dogs jumped over some bars (bigger dogs = more bars to jump)! With hard-sell commentary to try to get you to buy your kid some cheaply-made stuffed dogs, and also “collector’s editions” with leather tags, which will “increase in value the longer you keep them”! And lots of IAMS product hype. And people with mullets and gold lamé jackets. And fat jokes. And we had to keep our snark to a minimum because the kid was enjoying it. AND there was no beer in which to drown one’s regret about spending forty-five minutes of one’s precious life there.
We recovered with the mandatory ice-cream waffle experience (D had not had one before! The horror!) and a bit more tooling around the kiddie midway, including foot massages from these odd chair-machines with a small metal footpad which vibrates insanely for $0.25.
Then we went home and fell down**. And it was good.
—
* Who ate some of the red coating then decided to just eat the apple — is that even allowed?
** Well, no. After M went to bed, both D and I worked for a few hours. But we wanted to fall down.