The Kearns family were the big winners at the Chestermere Country Fair Red Ribbon Competition Sept. 10.
The family made up of Jamie-Ann Kearns, her husband Jeff, and their kids Anna, 10, Laura, 9, James, 8, and Jack, 3, won the Family Grand Aggregate Trophy.
“It’s a huge thing,” said Jamie-Ann Kearns, “I’m so happy.”
“To dream that I would ever have my name on the same trophy as pillars of the community…is a dream come true,” she said.
“They’ve literally been doing it all summer long,” said Jeff, “it’s been kind of a big drive this whole summer for everybody.”
The trophy is awarded to the family with the most points added up from all the classes in the Red Ribbon competition.
Winning this prize has been Jamie-Ann’s dream since they entered in a few categories at last year’s fair. Jeff said that they did pretty well last year.
“She said last year ‘I want to win the family aggregate next year’,” said Jeff, “Everything was geared towards getting good vegetables and good flowers.”
The Kearns family had close to 100 hundred entries in the competition.
The final week before the competition was a lot of stress to get everything organized, finished tagged and entered they said.
“Especially Friday, because we had to get everything in,” said Anna, “We were all running around.”
Working together to get ready for the contest has been a great family project.
“This is an amazing activity for the entire family,” said Jeff, “It gets everybody involved it brings everybody together in your family.”
In Jamie-Ann’s mind, the best entry they worked on was the lemon bars.
“When it comes to making memories…the funnest part with the family would be the lemon bars,” she said.
They had a friendly competition within the family, that Jeff won, to make the lemon bars. The bars went on to win first place in their category.
“We had so much fun doing it,” said Jamie-Ann.
The most challenging entry for the family was their vegetables.
“It was so wet and our garden just wouldn’t dry out,” said Jeff.
Despite the stress of the last week, the family is pretty sure they’ll try to repeat their win again next year.
“The payoff…of today’s day carries these kids a very, very, very long way,” said Jamie-Ann.
“Today’s been amazing,” said Jeff, “I fully expect us to probably do something similar next year.”
In addition to the aggregate trophy, Jamie-Ann won the flower trophy and Laura placed third in the Craig Lawrence Memorial LEGO competition.
