2010 Weber Decathlon

Over fall break, we had the first ever Weber Decathlon. It consisted of ten events in which our family of six all competed. The whole point of the competition was to encourage good sportsmanship, cheering others on, and to just have some fun. In the end, we were able to accomplish all three.

Macy makes an impressive push off the wall in the swimming competition!

Here's Allie competing in the nerf gun target shooting. If you've never had one of these guns, you should get one - they're fun!

Big kids and adults all had handicaps to make it an even playing field. I was not even a contender in cornhole.

We had to get Zoe to fetch a toy twice in the shortest amount of time. Tommy (and Zoe) did great at this!

The pancake making competition was a tough event because four of the competitors had never ever made their own pancakes before. Not to mention we had a couple burns on the hot griddle. Good life lessons.

As with the pancake competition, our lego creations faced a fierce panel of judges (Grandma and Grandpa). It was tough, though, because all the creations were great.

Here we had to see how many goals we could make in four attempts. And that goalie was working against us! Way to go Macy!

Here Daddy is competing for the best time on a Mario Kart race. He did good, but it is Jack who has some major Mario Kart skills.

I don't have any photos to post of the last two events: Wipeout Challenge (where you try to select who is going to win in an episode of Wipeout) and Bible Memory Verse (where you have to memorize a verse that you didn't know before, and say it perfectly), but we did catch them on some short video clips. Here is the video of our 2010 Weber Decathlon:



Here are four of the decathletes with the medals that they earned. They each won two events, and mommy and daddy each won one event. We had ordered medals ahead of time, so they were all ready for the closing ceremonies.

The entire competition was super fun, but we also learned some lessons through the experience. Steve and I realized that the kids needed to be taught how to cheer one another on. It probably comes as no surprise, but they each seemed to focus on themselves. Thus, they naturally responded with anger when someone else did well in an event. And the tears flowed. However, this is not the spirit that we were trying to foster, so we had to have a couple family talks. And at the time, it seemed pretty disappointing to us as parents, but as we look back on it we realize that this was the perfect opportunity to teach some much-needed life lessons. If anything we learned/taught takes root, then the entire competition would be even more worth-while than originally designed to be. And maybe we will see progress made when the next Weber Decathlon takes place (most likely not for another year or two). All said, it was a great experience!