Field Day!

Last month I helped to plan our second annual home school field day. (This was for the same group of home schooling families from church with whom we do all of our field trips.) At last year's field day, we rotated the kids through a lot of individual, skill events--long jump, 50-yard dash, shooting baskets, etc.--and only did one or two group events at the end. It went well administratively, but it really didn't bring us together as a group or allow the kids to cheer each other on. So this year we scrapped all of the athletic tests and just did a ton of fun and silly relays. And it was a blast.

Here are some of the kids waiting for the first event to start. (You can see that Matthew looks a little woozy here--all three of my big kids had some emotional moments through the morning, but overall they did very well.)

Here they're all lined up and ready to race.

This is Matthew, doing one of the early relays (they got more involved and challenging as we went on), where the kids had to carry beanbags under their chins.

Our friend Mrs. Amanda Welton, who was in charge of the whole shabang and did a terrific job.

For our sack race we used IKEA bags--not a bad fit for little kids. Meg going...

Going...

And coming back.

It was so great to have many of the parents there and involved.

This was the Shoe Box Slide relay; unfortunately, we discovered early on in this event that not all shoe boxes are created equal. Some of them didn't hold up well at all, and that gave the team that ended up with the best boxes an advantage. But when it's all about fun and laughter anyway, you can just keep right on sliding.

And sliding...

And sliding!

Meg didn't have any fun with this one, can you tell?

Our friends the Bangs ran every event with huge grins on their faces; it was too cute.

The piece de resistance was our obstacle course (all credit goes to Mrs. Welton for the planning and gathering all of the materials). Here are a few of our favorite kiddos running the course:

And after everyone had the chance to run the course once, we had to do it again--with water. They did it carrying holey bags of water over their heads...

And they did it with all the dads (and yours truly) shooting water at them with guns and squirters. That one was really fun. But I didn't get any pictures that time, since I was prowling around with my Super Soaker.

The minimum age for participating was four, so Esme was my little helper that day. She ran for jump ropes and swim noodles, helped me fill up buckets, and used my camera to take about 100 pictures of the sky, the grass, and people's elbows. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of her, but a friend snapped this one of my little Seriousness:

After the official events ended, we handed out prizes and ate lunch. One of the prizes was the aforementioned water squirters, so things quickly deteriorated into an all-out water fight (amongst the kids, that is. Some parent had the wisdom to declare adults off-limits after about the first 10 seconds). By the end of the morning, my kids were dripping wet and exhausted, but very satisfied. It was a fantastic time, and I'm so grateful we got to do it again this year.