Spring Carnival

ISU had their Spring Carnival on Saturday. It was a lot of fun. They were charging $10 per family or a canned food item per person. Originally it was planned for outside, but because of some rain earlier in the day, they held it in the student union. There were two main rooms. In the first room they had the inflatables. The kids got to do a giant obstacle course/slide several times. I took Agnes through it once, but she didn't enjoy it all that much. After that was a bounce house. Agnes really liked that one and kept going back to it as her siblings did other things. There was also a potato sack race. The kids were all pretty good at it because they have shorter strides. Instead of having to hope, for the most part they could just run while holding the bag up. Then Julia and Ethan tried to do Sumo wrestling, but the costumes were a little large and heavy for them and they had a hard time standing up. Rebecca and I did it instead and it didn't take her long before she pinned me. They also had jousting and all of the kids gave that a try. The jousting poles were a little heavy for them, so they kind of just swung them around until someone lost their balance and fell off the pedestal. Rebecca and I gave that a try as well. The battery was drained on our camera at that point, so we didn't get pictures of the rest.





















The last thing that they had in that room was a kiddie pool with sand and arrow heads that the kids got to look for. They loved that they got to bring them home. They made necklaces out of them and have been wearing them all day. There was also this stick and arrow throwing thing that Rebecca picked up much quicker than I did. She even killed a mastodon for us.


In the second room we started off with the food. They had corndogs, hamburgers, french fries, pop, popcorn, cotton candy, and churros. The food was super good quality, but it was still fun. After eating, the second room had tons of games to play - things like the ring toss, softball tic-tac-toe, and floating rubber ducks. The kids all earned tickets from these games which they spent on stuffed snakes and bouncy balls. Then we got in line for face painting. We were probably just five or six people back, but it was one lady and she took her time for each person so we were in line for over an hour. That was okay, because the kids just kept playing the games while we waited. She was definitely worth the wait. It was bar far the best face painting that I have ever seen. It is too bad the kids had to wash it all off at the end of the night.





While we were waiting in line we also got to see a corndog eating contest. There were five contestants to begin with an the first to eat 15 corndogs got a small TV. Rebecca thought I should enter (not because she wanted the TV), but because she thought it would be entertaining to watch me do it. When they unveiled the plates with the corndogs on them, 15 seemed like a huge number. Three of the contestants dropped out somewhere between 5-8 in. There were two left and one of them was way ahead of the other. He just shoved them in quickly until he only had 2 left. The other guy still had like 6 to go. But then the guy with 2 left just stopped and stood up. He was pacing back and forth for about 15 minutes and the other guys was very slowly catching up. Finally, the guy who was in the lead threw it all up and so he was disqualified. It was pretty gross, but luckily I don't think anyone in our family was watching at that moment.

It ended with them giving away an x-box 360 with 6 games. There were about 70 people there, so with 7 in our family I thought we had a pretty good chance. Not that we would have wanted it - we would have just taken it back to the store - but drawings an raffles are always exciting. We didn't win it though. At the end of the carnival they just said that people could grab whatever they wanted off the prize table, so we got a bunch of party favors for Ethan's birthday party coming up and 50 or so poppers.

The kids had a great time. I am so glad that we live in a college town now where they have a lot of fun events like that for students, but also for people from the community.