Field Day - warts and all

Today was Field Day at the kids' school.  I must say, I much prefer field day to the traditional British "Sports Day".  The annual humiliation of coming last in a running race, in front of the whole of the rest of the school plus everyone's parents has always been hard for me to love.  At field day it's all team games and activities, no onlookers, and what token element of competition there is comes far behind the main directive of the day - to have fun.

It's a whole day event, and I had volunteered to help for the first couple of hours.  As a newbie, I was allocated to a somewhat controversial activity called "Fungus Feet".  Actually, not its real name.  "Marble Toes" is when you have a paddling pool filled with water and marbles, and you sit around with a bunch of your classmates picking out the marbles with your bare feet.

As one of the teachers put it, "Hands up who wants a communicable disease!"  Though kids with suppurating sores on their feet were not allowed to take part, everyone else was welcome, athletes foot and verrucas (plantar warts) and all.  Traditionally, no-one changes the water throughout the day.  And when the game was over, the kids all shared towels to dry their feet, too!  Admittedly it doesn't match the infection-spreading ambition of a certain English junior school (see comments to this link) where the kids all had to bob for apples in a shared bucket at the height of the swine flu epidemic. Even so...

Ah, but after a full day of wet-sponge relays, capture-the-flag, skipping (jump-rope), face-painting, sno-cones and much, much more, what did both my kids think was the best activity of them all? 

Yep, you guessed it.  "That game where you pick up marbles with your toes."