When it was announced at church that a carnival was being organized to wrap up the Vacation Bible School...Wes saw an opportunity to volunteer. Carnival and Wes are two words that kind of go together like peanut butter and jelly. :) He and one other man from church started meeting early in the morning, and put together an absolutely wonderful event. It was kind of a three week mad dash build with two small volunteer days at church. Wes was mostly in charge of the games. He spent his free time searching the internet for knock down bottles, rubber frogs and drooling over all of the authentic carnie stuff he would have to add in the future. The rest of us followed his lead and built, sewed, painted whatever he told us to do. None of us knew quite where we were all going...but obviously Wes had a plan.
Aiden loved to help paint...and still has pink spray paint in his hair to prove it. But his favorite job, as you all can probably assume, was overseeing the build. One night as I was stuffing punk dolls with straw, he rode up to me on his John Deere pedal tractor and informed me, "Mom, my job is to ride around and make sure everyone is working. We need to finish these games for the kids." I'm not sure this little kiddo is going to be happy unless he ends up in management some day. :)
One of my tasks was sewing the knock-down punks, which was quite a sewing adventure. When I came inside from the studio to show Wes my practice punk, Mabel claimed it immediately, started shaking it and gnawing on the fur. I can't even tell you how long it's been since she's played with any toys. It made me happy to know that if these punks didn't quite make it to the game line up...at least I knew they would make great dog toys. :) 
Fortunately the punks did make it to the game line up, and survived year one of being smacked by fast balls. Other games included a ball toss (which Jude was awesome at and got two balls in a pink cup)...
the frog flop - where you smack the "flopper" with a rubber mallet and try to flip a frog (or turtle) onto a group of lily pads in one of the adjacent baby pools. Much more difficult than it sounds...although Aiden got very close to getting the turtle to make it once!!
Wheel of fortune...made with two cast off bicycle wheels...free from Scheels!! Genius (and very cute to boot)!!
The bumper car, where you have to pull the car back on the set of rubber bands...and then see how far you can get it to bounce. It has a little ticker on the side of the car that goes between the aluminum rods and tells you what size prize you win. Very cool!
The classic washer toss. I'm seeing a bit of an orange colored theme going on here...that probably doesn't have anything to do with me being an influence on the color choices. :)
There were three air filled bouncy castles. Jude and Aiden loved these. Well...Jude loved them until a bunch of bigger kids joined him one time and he got a bit stuck. I had to have a nice boy go in and rescue him from among the bouncing craziness. Before bed I was asking him about the carnival.
"Did you like the ducks, Jude?" 'yea'
"Did you like throwing the balls?" 'yea'
"Did you like jumping?" 'no'
Here Jude is with the very cool duck pond. Ducks floating in just a baby pool wasn't going to cut it for Wes...he had to have the classic, "real" duck pond...and it was very cool! It took Jude about twenty minutes to pick up his first duck. He was just having fun watching them float around the circle and sticking his hand in the water. :)
This water game was pretty popular with all ages. As you shot water in the funnel, the tube would fill up and float a ping pong ball up to the finish line. The first ball to the line won!
Below we have the classic, Plinko. This one was again a fun one for Jude since there were balls involved... although he liked pitching the ball about half way down the game board rather than setting it down at the top of the game. :)
Near the end of the evening you could trade in your food tickets for a hot dog or pulled pork sandwich. The boys each got a balloon which made them feel pretty important. :) Preparing for the carnival we kind of prepared ourselves, saying that even if it was just a few kids that showed up that it was worth the effort and it would just get bigger every year. By the food that was eaten I think we were guessing that we had somewhere around 200 people. Lots of people from church...but also everybody commented that there were a lot of faces that we didn't recognize. So I think it is save to say that everything was a huge success and hopefully will become a tradition and a great way to wrap up Vacation Bible School each year. 
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