Carnival!

Yesterday afternoon was even nicer than the morning so, after getting Kellen from school, we worked out in the front yard for a bit. Well, actually, I pulled weeds in the garden while Kellen and Madison played with Kellen's friend Braden. It was so much better than being cooped up in the house! I now have a large bucket of weeds ready to take down the recycling center, and my garden area looks so much better :)
After that, we did some quick left overs for dinner so that we would be able to get to the school at 6pm for my time slot volunteering with Kellen's classroom booth. Technically, I'm the one who signed up for the the volunteering. Kellen was the one who actually ran it while we were in there. His teacher explained to us what we needed to do and he stepped to immediately start taking tickets and handing out prizes. I really didn't do very much! Our booth was "3 Wheelers" and the object was to take a three-wheeled pull-and-release vehicle and see if you could get it stop inside the taped parameters for 1st and 2nd prize; anywhere else that it stopped got you a 3rd prize. In case you can't see in the picture, the green area in the center is 1st, while the two in red at the outside edges are 2nd.


When our time behind the booth was up, I bought $3.50 in tickets (at 25 cents each) and gave all but two of them to Kellen. He promptly disappeared into the crowd with them. I had thought it would be fun to get some pictures of him playing the games, but that obviously wasn't what he was thinking. Bummer. I did catch up with him twice more before it was time to go home. Once to see him play this game (below) and get one picture, and again when I told him that Michelle had Madison and I was taking Travis around the games. So I started wandering out front with every intention of just waiting for Kellen to finish off his tickets and we'd go home. Then I saw Michelle, obviously upset and frantically seeking her kids. I wished her luck finding them, but then caught sight of them myself and flagged them down. As Michelle was getting ready to go sit at a booth, she commented that she wasn't sure how she was going to get rid of all the tickets her kids bought and take Travis around to stuff while she was sitting at a booth. I wasn't doing anything but hanging with Madison, so I offered to trade with her; she could let Madison sit with her and I'd take Travis to a couple of things. This was when I went back and found Kellen really quick and told him plans had changed; instead of just walking out to the front of school where I would be waiting, he would have to find me somewhere in the carnival since I was going to go do stuff with Travis. Then Travis and I went for some cotton candy (4 tickets) and a ride on the train out in front of the school (another 4 tickets) before Michelle caught up with us. Kellen had seen her with Madison and was walking with her, so we traded back kids and I took mine home for some dessert. Kellen had spent all of his tickets on games, neglecting to notice the cotton candy, snow cones, hot dogs, or train ride that were all outside of the multi-purpose room! Oh, well.

After dessert and a little Goodnight Show on Sprout, we put Kellen in his room with a Ranger Rick magazine while I tucked Madison in and waited for her to go to sleep. Once she was down, Kellen came back out so that we could play a promised round on his new game from Grandma and Papa, from their most recent trip to Disneyland. Kellen, of course, has the best luck and beat me soundly before we'd even made one circuit around the board. Oh, well.