Field Day

In honor of Covid-19 ruining the best parts of the Spring (and Summer, and probably Fall, and all of 2020) I have decided to revive the blog and write about the thing that Covid has destroyed that honestly cannot be forgiven at this point. No, I'm not talking about Prom. I'm not talking about graduation. I'm talking about elementary school field day. So here are the highlights of that day from when I was a kid, because aside from this year having to be a virtual field day, they have changed exactly zero.


Opening Ceremonies
First things first, we are going to need some Pomp, and we are going to need a whole heck of a lot of Circumstance. Literally that song will need to play on repeat as each class marches outside in militant formation and flawlessly aligns in the parking lot. We will have rehearsed this never, yet we pull this off perfectly.

There is exactly one reason why this goes off without a hitch - our teachers will have threatened to take away the snow cone party at the end of field day if we screw this up for them, and every single one of us knows they are as serious as a heart attack about it. The last child will exit the building specifically on the last note of the song, military precision, and then some child will sing the Star Spangled Banner while wearing the school mascot costume. This will be hilarious to all of us and none of us will laugh, again, due to aforementioned risk of snow cone party removal.

Themes
Field days are themed. The theme is patriotism. Your class will not get to be America. Honestly, the most annoying class in the world somehow "drew from a hat" getting to be America and they will reallllly rub it in. And their class mom will go out and buy them all like Team USA olympic tear away windsuits or something absurd and your class is left making Djibouti tie dye t-shirts and you don't even care because you get INTO IT. You are team Djibouti. Did you know Djibouti speaks mostly French and Arabic and has volcanos? GO BLUE AND GREEN!

Competition

The premise of field day is "Let's prove how many different ways Ainsley can lose at something". But, like a goldfish with a 12 second memory span, I would float from station to station and be fully convinced I was going to be bringing home the GOLD in this newest challenge. Oh, shot put? FOR SURE  going to beat every single kid in my 2nd grade class at throwing a ball denser than the sun a thousand yards. It's irrelevant that I was specifically put at 1st base on my softball team for the explicit purpose that 1st basemen rarely have to throw the ball, and that is truly the only position on the field that has that unique feature. I'm a throwing master now. Let's rage.

Closing Ceremonies

Jamie Savinski beat everyone every year. She was amazingly fast, and was better at everything than even the boys. Also she was my best friend up until like 4th grade so even though I literally never won, I kind of won vicariously through her. Her reward was that she got to get her snow cone first. I mean, what a treasure. Also this was the moment that being the class from Djibouti with the tie dye t-shirts paid off. Well well well Team America, looks like your wind suits all got stained and ruined with snow cone juice, and our shirts just got more tie dyed. BOOM. MIC DROP.