Winning Prizes for the Kid

Billy loves squirrels...and Ice Age has the neatest/weirdest squirrel! HE loves Scrat! And they had this one game that had these four foot long Scrats...he drooled and drooled and spent $6 of his own dollars on it before saying, "too hard, need food money" and quit playing. BUT, he told me about it...so I tried... It was called Pong Pond Pool...as in swimming pool, not cue stick pool. There were two swimming pools with floating lily pads. On each lily pad was a glass custard dish. The lily pads floated around in the current (around in a circle). The goal was to get a ping pong ball to STAY in one of the custard cups. I spent a buck for 7 balls and tried out my technique...not good, not even close! So, I spent a couple hours walking around the thing watching others. I got a funnel cake and sat down on a bench right in front of the game! I looked all day, and never saw a single person walking around carrying a prize from that booth...hmmm, must be nearly impossible. The only rules posted was that the ball must stay in the cup to count as a win..the same person could only win four times in a day...and each ball had to be thrown individually, you couldn't wing the whole bucket at the pool!

An hour before we had to be back at the bus, I bought a $5 bucket of balls and tried again...55 balls in the bucket (my count...so lord knows how many there actually were). I got quite a few to bounce in...and right back out. I had one bounce in one cup, bounce out and land in another cup and swirl around and around before spinning out over the edge. Throwing them at the cups was useless...but BOUNCING them on the floor in front of the pool...and letting them bounce into the pool from the floor...got much closer (that was the one that almost stayed in). I learned these two things by observing! I tried this one on my own, letting them bounce TWICE on the floor before getting to the pool...that worked great! I had three "almost" stay in. OK...got another $5 bucket. First ball of that bucket bounced twice, bounced into a cup and didn't move! Needless to say, I'm glad I didn't have an audience of band kids because I was jumping up and down and yelling! I gathered up my HUGE Scrat. Hey, his tail dragged on the ground while I was carrying him...you can tell how big he really is from these pictures...he takes up more than 2/3 of the couch!. I gave the rest of my bucket full of balls to a little girl who was sitting next to me (and told her dad to let the balls bounce a couple of times on the floor and let them bounce their way into the pool)...and then I headed back to the bus.

Let me tell you...walking through the park carrying a 4 foot high stuff toy gets you lots of attention! Even for me that was a bit much! And, you should have seen the band kids when I cleared the gate near the bus. There were lots of "OMG"s, "Wow"s and "Holy Crap"s! Billy looked my direction to see what the commotion was about, his eyes lit up, he screamed, "I love you mommy!" took off his quads, threw his mallets down and came running...no skipping...towards me, grabbed me in a big hug and twirled me AND Scrat around! Let me tell you, THAT was well worth the $11, the time spent spying and the looks and the hoots and hollers I got while dragging Scrat through the park!

Oh, and the best part....my mom funded the game with quarters from her purse and car! She gave me this hideous change purse of patch work leather from the dollar store...filled with quarters for games. Last year I won prizes for everyone from the shooting gallery. This year I played for Scrat...

Sooo...does this qualify for TMI about Kennywood??? :)