ST. PAUL — Maren, Greta and Liv Vekved did not sweep the State Fair dairy barn, which nobody expected, including the Vekved triplets, and all three came out of their first two days with ribbons, notes from judges and the satisfaction of discovering that Bernice can become irritated in a barn containing several hundred cows.

The girls, 12, advanced from the Pine County Fair after taking grand champion dairy calf, cow and steer in the same afternoon, the first single-family sweep anybody in the county barn could remember. State competition was larger, louder and considerably less interested in the fact that all three exhibitors have the same birthday and are separated by eleven minutes.

Maren’s spring Holstein heifer placed in the upper half of a deep class Saturday morning. Greta and Bernice placed fourth in their age group Sunday, the family’s best finish so far. Liv’s dairy steer placed later Sunday and earned another ribbon in a class Karl Vekved described as “good cattle all the way down.”

“They all got called back once,” their mother, Janet Vekved, said. “That’s a good State Fair.”

The difference between county and state showing is mostly scale and waiting. At Pine County, the girls could walk from the tie-outs to the show ring in a few minutes and knew half the people on the rail. At the State Fair, classes are larger, barns are louder, check-in happens on a schedule that does not care where an exhibitor parked, and a dairy animal can spend an hour looking ready before it is actually time to move.

Greta said Bernice handled the noise well until a neighboring cow objected to an electric clipper.

“She didn’t do anything bad,” Greta said. “She just looked at me like I had arranged it.”

Pine County 4-H coordinator Karen Ojala said the State Fair trip is supposed to be educational even when no championship comes home.

“The ribbon matters,” Ojala said. “But the first time a kid walks into that barn and realizes the best animal in their county is one good animal among a hundred good animals, that matters too.”

The girls are staying with an aunt in Roseville while Karl Vekved commutes between the fairgrounds and the cattle. They will miss Wednesday and Thursday at Prairie View Middle School, the first two days of seventh grade, under the district’s longstanding excused-absence policy for State Fair 4-H exhibitors.

Their schoolwork came south in three folders.

Liv reported that this arrangement is “not exactly missing school if the math is in Roseville.”

Dale Brandt, Lakeside superintendent, said eleven district students will begin the year on excused State Fair absences, a collision made more visible because Lakeside is opening before Labor Day for the first time.

“We knew it when we adopted the calendar,” Brandt said. “The fair is not an extracurricular problem we discovered in August. It is part of these kids’ year.”

The Vekved girls are expected back in Misquah Thursday night and in class Friday morning.

Janet Vekved said the ribbons will probably still be in the truck.