Undoukai goes off with a bang

Ah, the much awaited sports day finally arrives! Here we have the grade 4 relay baton exchange. The relay was the only real sports involved in the day. Other than that there was a lot of dancing and game playing. I was only involved in one event; The Ball in the Bowl. Our team lost. Bugger. It was fun though because I got paired up with one of my favourite kids. (yes I have favourites). For all the planning and general running around crazy-like that was happening over the past month, it was a very ordinary day though. I had to be at the school at bloody 7am to help set up tables and etc which of course was acheived in about 10 minutes because it usually doesn't take 15 grown adults an hour to move 20 tables 10 metres and tie a few signs up. But oh we felt really prepared because we got up super early on a Sunday. Luckily it hadn't rained much overnight so we didn't have to resort to mopping the sports field (see pictured patch of gritty dirt) using newspaper and towels which was the plan discussed at the What if it rains?? meeting we had late Saturday arvo. In the end the weather was good; not wet, not too hot and a little breeze so all the weather updates we had been getting from all angles every hour on the hour for the past week seemed even more ludicrous than when they had been happening.

One great thing that happened was during the tug of war picture left two kids ran into each other while racing to pick up the rope and bounced off each other and fell arse over in the dust. It was hilarious although I don't think I was supposed to laugh. At lunch time the kids all sat and ate with their parents and we retreated to the staffroom. The teachers were a bit overwhelmed by the dads being there too I think. Usually the school only sees the mothers of the kids so when the dads rock up they don't really have anything to say to them because a)they don't know whose parent they are and b) they don't know anything about them. But the kids were heaps excited about it and kept saying, "Look that's my dad!" In the end the white team won by 9 points which they didn't seem extremely excited about, just pleased I would say. They had organised cheers and the like, but when they won a game or something they never seemed particularly delirious with the joy of success, only about half of them would bother doing the bonzai (which was the designated way to celebrate a win as written in the schedule). Except the grade 1s, they were heaps excited about everything and even the losing team jumped around during their bonzai. In all I found it was a much more sedate affair than the sports days I remember as a child. But perhaps that is because I was a child then and clearly am trying not to be now... It wasn't an awful day. Especially when you consider that we had drinks afterwards in Shin-Kurashiki followed by karaoke. Can't go wrong.