To Be a Kid Again

On Saturday, I needed to head over to the church to get some things ready for choir practice on Sunday. I knew there was a Relief Society things going on for about four or five hours and that I would be able to get in. I get there, and find that two guys in our ward are babysitting 10 kids for five hours. So I decided to pitch in and help.

The weather happened to be really good that day, and a lot of the kids were getting bored being stuck in the same room for hours on end. So we had them outside, but without any structure they were all over the place and not confined to a single area. So we decided to start playing some games in the back lawn of the church grounds.

We were planning on starting by playing tag. The problem was that there was nothing that we could use for natural bases. We solved that by having me be one base, and another adult be the other base. We had played for a little bit and one of the kids needed to go to the bathroom. So the other guy left me alone with about 8 other kids. I had already anticipated something like this and came up with something that they could do.

All of the kids were under 10, so I told them all to line up, told them that all of them were it and that the first person to catch me won. Yes a little chaotic, and I'm sure there's a recipe for disaster somewhere in there, but we did it anyway. Of course I could easily outrun all of them for quite some time, so I would try to get within inches of being caught and get away from them. I'd also try to dodge right inbetween two kids as well. This was usually when they caught me.

After we had done this for several times, I had them all line up, said go, and watched them all come running for me. I waited for the last possible second to leap out of them way and take off, only to find that I ended up tripping over my own feet. Now, I usually have fairly good reflexes and tried to roll and jump up on my feet before I got caught. Well I'm halfway up before I'm hit by the first kid. Well, if all the kids see you on the ground, they know that the chances of them catching me are really quite good, so instead of stopping since the first kid got me, well tackled me is more like it, the rest of the kids saw it in their best interest to do the same.

So now I'm on the ground with eight kids piled on top of me, and the other adult walks around the corner of the church to find a group of kids dogpiled up and no adult in sight. I'm sure it was an interesting to watch as finally the kids got up, since they all certainly had tagged me at that point, to find me crushed under the weight of all those kids. And I loved every minute of it. I haven't gotten to do that in a while. In Kentucky, I would usually babysit my sister's kids and get some exposure to playing with kids, and since I haven't been able to do that in so long, it was fun and a nice change of pace. Ahhh... to be a kid again.