Saturday, November 04, 2006

Good Old Fashioned Church Carnival & Cakewalk

Tonight the kids and I attended our church's yearly old fashioned fall festival (Mike was in Mississippi on a business trip, so he missed the fun). We entered the gymn to see an assortment of booths and activities to choose from, the kids were immediatiately excited to be part of the action as soon as I could get tickets.

I quickly delivered the cake I'd made to donate to the cake walk (a 4 - Layer Chocolate Barvarian Torte, a definite family favorite that gets made about once per year for something special), then got in line to purchase tickets and enter the doorprize drawings. We explored the various booths to plan our ticket purchases... hot apple pie & ice-cream, cinni-buns, root beer floats, supper plate, balloon/dart game, floating ducks game, old fashioned country store, little tykes automated train ride, dunking booth, book sale area, or cake walk?

The answer was clear - cake walk - this had been the event my children were waiting to experience all week. We figured if the 5 of us were on the wheel we'd have a pretty good chance out of 15 spots (yes Ruby got involved too and loved it)! First round, we didn't win anything, so we decided to go again, Elliot had set his mind to going home with a cake! The accordian player began playing and around we went until she stopped. Number 10 was called, and I was on it! I told the kids they could choose for me from over 20 cakes on the table. They decided instantly that the one we brought was the one we would return home with, since they thought it was the very best one there (talk about melting a moms heart...). There was much teasing and pretend protest from the other cake walkers who all claimed that THAT was the one they wanted, etc. etc... making the kids feel quite proud of Mom's cake AND the fact they had won it back to it's rightful owners. Too funny :-)

After that the kids had fun in various places...

Ruby loved to pick floating ducks and win small farm animals to add to her collection. She also tried to hijack the kiddie train several times, even though she was always given extra long rides anyway.

The other kids had fun all over the place, winning prizes everywhere - including ANOTHER cake ( a lovely bundt cake this time). We also found a special treasure in the country store area we were not expecting - a certain ceramic popcorn bowl no longer made to replace one that Elliot had received years ago for his b-day (since popcorn is his favorite food). It arrived broken in the mail and we could not get it replaced. We glued it together as best we could and kept it until we finally gave it up when packing to move - since it was unusable. NOW, here was an identical one in pristine condition for a few tickets - joy! Snatched up before you could spell p-o-p-c-o-r-n!

Christopher's proud moment of the evening was at the "Baptize the Pastor" dunking booth. He bought one ticket - had one ball and took him down with one throw.. splash!!!

Christopher & I also enjoyed looking through the books that the Adventist Christian Book Center had brought to sell. I purchased one as a gift and Christopher bought a very interesting biography he was intrigued by.

The close of the evening was the doorprize drawings. Amazingly each of us won a little something, which was fun.

In the end, there were LOTS of prizes and goodies to be had by all, and I don't think one child present left even close to emptyhanded! My crew is already asking if next year our family can plan and run a booth of some kind... I told them that we have plenty of time to come up with an idea!??

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