a long stretch of road: Water fight!!

Today was our second Kermes (the day when the volunteers need to organize an event for all 400 of the kids). The theme for today was Water Day, basically a bunch of different water games outside in the soccer field. It made me think a lot about field day as a kid (which I loved despite absolutely hating sports. There's just something fun about a whole day of playing outside and eating snacks in the grass.)

Here's Steph, Mark and Liz getting ready to hand out some Jello to start us off...

...as Kristina and Antje drag their water balloons up the Hundred Stairs of Death. (Notice how helpful I am by taking a picture and then frolicking merrily away.

The weather was awesome, probably close to 80 degrees and sunny out. All the volunteers had to choose a station to man for the day; Charlotte and I lucked out with the babies activity: Splish Splish Splash (basically Duck Duck Goose but with water. When you find the person you want, you dump a bucket of water on them). We had zippo prep work for our station other than bringing a bucket, so compared to the other groups we got off easy. We mentioned many times this past week how lucky we were that we didn't need to spend time planning anything, only to realize once we sat down on the field that neither of us could remember how to play Duck Duck Goose. (Do people sometimes have to sit in the middle of the circle? If so, why??) In the end it didn't matter though, we ended up changing all the rules anyway, especially after the special needs kids joined us. Everyone understood that they needed to splash a little water onto people's heads and then dump the whole thing on one person, but things got cloudy after that. They didnt understand the whole tagging part but knew they had to run, so once someone got soaked they would stand up, run away, and then come back to the circle after a minute for their turn to wet someone. Really the game was just an excuse to dump water on someone's head.

Here's me and Rosita after getting thoroughly soaked the whole game. She was cold so she wanted to cuddle up, so cute :)

Rosita spots her target...

Axel was a good sport. He has autism and usually does his own thing away from the other kids, but he sat with everyone today and therefore was fair game for the buckets. He ended up really loving it and was the favorite target of the day