Scavenger Hunt

How can you get the chaplain, his wife, and their ten-year old daughter to walk into a busy shopette (the on-base convenience store), flapping their arms like wings, making loud chicken sounds, and cluck their way right up to Church's chicken counter where they ask the dumbfounded lady if they need any fresh chicken, all while being videotaped by yours truly? It's relatively easy, actually. It's the same thing that makes the chaplain's wife and I stand in the middle of a busy baseball diamond singing the national anthem in less than 20 seconds, and performing "I'm singing in the rain" with umbrella and Gene Kelly-like tap moves in front of the base theater.

It's a scavenger hunt.

And why would anyone in their right mind, at least a few decades too old for a scavenger hunt, and while it's 100 degrees outside participate in a scavenger hunt? Your kids, of course.

My children usually don't do scavenger hunts. I have the coolest children on the block, for real, but they don't do "put-on group stuff" as the oldest likes to call it. No school sports, no clubs, no church groups. Nothing. Granted, they both did play in the school band (if you can call it that at their respective ages) for about a year, and the oldest did his best to play soccer when his dad was asked to coach the base teams, but that's about it. They don't do school spirit, and they really don't do groups that have been created for a purpose so to speak. They will hang out with their friends, throw impromptu trumpet / horn/ guitar concerts in our front yard, ride in base bicycle tours, and hang out in the woods behind our house, but it had better be unplanned and unstructured.

I'm not sure where they get this from. I am, and always have been a sucker for school spirit, and I have tried my best to pass this on to them. I've offered to buy them school shirts ("No, purple is just LAME, sheesh!"), take them to games or concerts ("Can't I just stay home and work on this song with insert random friend's name"), and talk to them about how much fun it is to be a part of something ("So you're saying that hanging out with kids who won't talk to me during lunch because of something to do with school will be FUN?"). Granted, their dad may have not been a member of a million clubs, societies, arts and sports team like I was, but at least he ran track, was a full-fledged memer of the beta club, and ended up joining the military, therefore doing nothing less than gushing pride and motivation right now.

So anyway, when I asked our kids if they wanted to do the scavenger hunt organized by the base chapel yesterday, and the youngest, upon hearing his friend was going to do it too, yelled a "yes!", I of course immediately signed up.

Now I wasn't going to do the scavenger hunt. Jill (the chaplain's wife, and the youngest's friend's mom) and I were going to chaperone some of the little ones in her car, and catch up on our lives. But once the kids had divided themselves into groups, and most of them decided to ride their bikes (including my youngest and his friend), only Jill's youngest was left alone, with no group and no bicycle as her older sister had appropriated that for her best friend. So what do you do when a ten-year old stares at you imploringly, begging you to be part of her team? You say yes.

And that's how you end up flapping your arms like a chicken in front of a half a dozen bemused shopette customers.

Admittedly, the scavenger hunt was the very best I have been on. Ever. And as a former girl scout I have been on more scavenger hunts than I care to remember, so I like to think of myself as somewhat of a scavenger hunt connoisseur. There was no ringing doorbells, asking people for bobbypins and diapers and unused hotel soaps. No, this scavenger hunt went milennial, and rocked. For one thing, it involved a video camera. And then the activities were things I could have made up, and as far as craziness goes, that's saying something. Among other things, we had to ask people at the BX to sing the Air Force theme song on camera, sit in a firetruck making siren sounds, do the "fork in a garbage disposal" Dance (we never did figure that one out) in the middle of the BX, get a tough to firefighter to admit he's seen 101 dalmatians (on camera), run through a drive through with a team member on your back, pretending to be a car, and best of all, convince a uniformed security police officer to sing "Bad boys, bad boys, watcha gonna do when they come for you" on camera.

The base chapel considers activities such as these to be a part of their outreach program, i.e., informing the base community about the chapel. Now although I'm not sure how having a ten year old and myself hang upside down in a playground singing "I believe I can fly" achieves that goal, but we did have fun. A lot of it.

And the best part? We won!