This afternoon was another of our town's planned bicentennial events - Family Fun Day. After many days of hot dry weather, it of course rained most of the day. Our residents should work for the postal service - rain, snow - some of us still manage to turn out.Most of the kids had never played any of the old-fashioned games. The sack race (can you believe we actually had to make our own burlap sacks?! - the feed companies use plastic or paper these days) was as much fun as always even if we did have to limit it to three at a time (we ran out of burlap for bags!)
Then there was the "hollerin'" contest but we could only get six kids to give it a try and two of them wouldn't do it unless no one looked at them (am sure that doesn't stop them at home!) Surprise, surprise! The shyest one had the loudest scream going (somehow the kids didn't quite understand the difference between hollerin' & screaming but no one was going to argue. Not to mention the adults were all too shy to compete themselves...)
The pie eating contest - (personally I find eating contests disgusting but I was outvoted.) For a bit of history it was called the "William Bulkley Pie Eating Contest". Now you may think I'm trying to associate "BULKley" with eating but in fact he was the person who developed the Chenango Strawberry Apple in our township. And the pies were, of course, apple.For a little more exercise in the rain there was the spoon race where you had to race balancing a raw egg in a spoon (the wimpy adults including myself are all under the eaves of the roof watching.)
But the most popular game of the afternoon proved to be the good old fashioned egg toss. On wet grass it was pretty unbelievable how far a raw egg could bounce without breaking. Eventually we had a winner. Then the kids wanted to play again & again until all the eggs were broken. The rain did come in handy after all....
