Category Archives: Things Katie Says

The city held a Life-Size Candyland Adventure and as soon as I saw it advertised a month or so ago, I signed us up! Since we don’t live in the city, it cost $7.50 instead of $5, but ALL of us got to play! 🙂 Owen was VERY excited about it, and kept pestering us all morning because he thought we were going to miss it.

You had to arrive 15 minutes early to be sure you were there for your scheduled start time. In that 15 minutes, there were two games to play (ring toss and peanut toss), a coloring station, a Froot Loop necklace station, and a build-an-airplane out of sticks of gum, lifesavers, and a roll of smarties. 🙂

Both kids tried the ring toss, and Katie actually got one! (Owen went back to play this one about 15 times, taking turns with other kids who wandered up.)

They also liked the peanut toss—Owen was actually pretty good and Katie had fun walking up to the basket to put them in. 🙂

Notice Owen’s style! Vaguely reminiscent of his frisbee style… 🙂

Post-cereal-stringing…Owen didn’t want to wear it, so Katie did! (And you can see her holding the candy plane.)

Here’s about what the plane looked like:

Now, even though I honestly didn’t know what to expect, it was a little less exciting (?) than I expected on first glance—I had hoped it would look MUCH MORE like an actual Candyland board. But after thinking about it, how much can you really do on an (I’m guessing) limited budget…?

So here’s the board (click for a bigger picture)! They used activity mat squares for the path—which was a good idea, except you don’t get all the colors of the board.

We all got gingerbread numbers to hang around our neck. Then they had someone calling out our numbers and then telling us what card we drew (one red, two yellows, etc.). While it worked fine, I would have liked it better (it would have been more like the real game) if they somehow showed us what the card was and WE had to decipher what it was. (They did have 11×17 sheets with the actual squares on them, so they could have…?) But I’m guessing all the shortcuts were for the sake of timing as each group has to be done in 15 minutes. Which I’m guessing is also why there were no pink candy cards. (But the pink candy cards are what make Candyland CANDY LAND…but I digress.)

So we had just barely started when another group of people joined us. I’m not sure what happened…if they were supposed to be with us to start but were late or what…but we had three more kids join us. It was okay and obviously we all still had fun, but I honestly would have liked it just a bit better if it had just been us. (Their kids were super annoying, one was really young and had NO idea how to play, and they got in the way of my pictures!)

Owen got a double green and jumped almost to the end (though, honestly, he went three greens but it was too much of a hassle to correct it and no one else seemed to notice or care).

Then someone else joined him!

Then another! How exciting! A three-way tie right at the very end!

Then Owen and another girl were tied on the very last square…

Then Owen won! No picture because they hurriedly called out the rest of the numbers to finish the game so everyone was crowded around getting their bags of candy. Then we were shuffled off to take a survey and that was it!

They had a very nice playground outside and it was a gorgeous day so we let the kids play for awhile.

Katie was SO proud she learned how to get down this way:

The best pics from the video:

And then I looked over and Katie was going down a big slide all by herself! No hesitation, no screeching, nothing. And loving it!