Sunday, March 22, 2009

Competition-crazy month

Been wondering what we've been up to? There's a lot to tell! For 4 weeks in a row, we had some sort of competitive event, most of them having to do with Awana. My sister Stephanie was especially busy, as she participated in each one! A privilege of being in 6th grade.

First weekend: Awana T&T Bible Quizzing. My mom helped coach, and I served as Timekeeper. Very interesting being part of such suspense. Steph quizzed alone against one other Book 4 quizzer (normally they are teams of 2 or 3). They were well-matched, but Stephanie pulled ahead and won! Yay!

Second weekend: Gamequest. It's true! Awana goes all the way to high school... it's a big secret, I know. Jr. and Sr. High have regional games and quizzing competition all on the same day. Chris, Michael, and Stephanie all joined onto other church's teams so they could play games. Michael and Stephanie's team (Trek) got 2nd place in the first round and 4th place in the second round. Chris's team (Journey) got 3rd. We see a lot of people that we know from camp there, so that's always great. Megan and Jared S. even came out to watch (long time no see, haha).

Third weekend: Sparks-A-Rama and AwanaGames!!! (I almost made a whole post for just this one, but obviously I changed my mind.) I was so excited for this day! I wish I could still play as a clubber, but helping coach is the next best thing. This was a very interesting day, because it was almost exactly like last year, except with all new people from our new church. Even down to the scores... Sparks finished, um, last... but our T&T WON!!! Woohoo! They did fantastic! At first we didn't know if we'd have enough people to make teams, but we did it, though we had to pull kids from 4 other churches to have enough. (Sparks did end up being short a girl, but they needed us to play so bad they let it slide). We had really cool blue camouflage T-shirts that made it very obvious who you were cheering for. (Ironically, they make it really easy to spot friends across the room, and they didn't help our Sparks at all in the game Rabbit Hunt.) Afterwards, we went to Culver's for ice cream, another tradition.

Fourth weekend: Odyssey of the Mind (or OM for short). OM used to be called Olympics of the Mind, and what it is is a competition of creativity. Michael and Stephanie did it with a couple other kids. They had to choose one of several tasks, then creatively accomplish it. The task they picked was to research the trials of Hercules (or Heracles), then make up their own and act it out, overcoming a few prescribed obstacles. This weekend was the State competition in St. Louis, and they got 2nd place out of 5 teams. That means they will go to World in May, which is held in Iowa. They will literally be up against teams from all over US and the world!

So there you have it: our past several weeks in a nutshell. Busy but fun!