Olympic Weekend

This past weekend we hosted an Olympic camping weekend at our place in Michigan.  I'm on the Board of Directors for the boys soccer league and last year was the first annual end of the season Board Members Family Camping Weekend.  This year we had a lot of fun with an Olympic theme.  The idea was for each family to choose a country and then have "costumes" and decorations, etc. for that country.  The larger part of the weekend revolved around lots of fun games and medals for the winners.  With a total of 19 kids and 12 adults, it was a busy, but FUN weekend for sure.  There may have been a mishap involving a clogged toilet and a Tupperware container melting on the stove, but we'll forget about those things.  :-)

The first game the kids did was a Scavenger Hunt.  We made 4 teams and sent the kids out into the woods with a long list.  The camp was soooo quiet that we decided to do another scavenger hunt the next day simply for a few minutes of peace for the adults. 

The next game we played involved the dads wearing shower caps covered in raspberry scented shaving cream while their children threw cheesballs at them.  Fun, right????  Well it was until we tried to do round 2 of that one too, after 2 other families arrived, and the moms had to wear the shower caps.  Notice that there aren't any pictures of that round!!!!  :-)

 Here's Brian tossing one at me while I'm busy laughing at him and taking pictures.

 

 Daisy and Henry were happy to help with the clean up effort....although I'm not so sure the shaving cream was a fantastic idea for them to eat.

 Then we were on to some serious face painting!  This guy was so wonderful to the younger boys during the course of the weekend.  He even let G paint his entire face.

 My friend Dianne did an AMAZING job with the face painting.  Here is G with the bird from the Polish flag on his face.  Yeah, we chose Poland as our country for the weekend.  G had me touch up that bird all weekend and didn't wash it off until late Sunday evening.

 G's red, white, and blue master piece and another one of Dianne's works of art.  You can see one of the medals here that we made for the kids.  We spray painted washers gold, silver, and bronze and hung them from red, white, and blue ribbon.  Even these older kids were loving the rewards for their efforts. 

The next event was a family relay.  Each family was given a paper bag with 10 cards in it.  Each card had a fun "task" to complete.  The family members rotated taking one card out at a time with that family member completing whatever was on his or her card.  So, each family did all of the same tasks, just in a different order.  Some of the tasks included......

Eating a marshmallow off of the volleyball net.  Our niece Jess was happy she got that one!

 Doing 5 push-ups.

Rolling a log around the deer feeder.

Catching a grasshopper. (I MAY have picked this card and put it back in the bag when no one was looking!)

Doing 25 jumping jacks.

And...

Eating cheeseballs off of a plate without using your hands.

Next up was the frozen t-shirt contest.  The day before I got t-shirts wet for each family, then tied a large knot in the middle of the shirt, wrapped the top and bottom around the middle and then froze them.  The goal of this game was to see who could get the shirt on first.  The tactics used to thaw the shirts were REALLY funny!  They included, warm water from indoors along with a meat tenderizer, warming up the grill....

Beating the shirts on logs....

Soaking the shirts in the pool and chopping at it with an ax.....

And my favorite.....

Holding the shirts over the fire using tongs and pudgy pie makers!

Our family took a gold in this event!  G was the brave one to put on the cold wet shirt!

The kids having fun with noodles, balls and the logs.

There may have been some much needed downtime for a quick movie as well. 

We had a great camp fire each night too.  Even made some unique s'mores recipes and had some adult beverages....who can pass up a few pitchers of Skip and Go Naked's???  We can't wait to plan this again for next year!!!