Super Saturday

CEREMONIAL: On Saturday afternoon, we headed to the Rainier Beach Community Center, for an awards ceremony for a t-shirt design contest Annabelle had entered a couple of weeks prior. 

When we arrived, we found Detective Cookie's Chess Club was underway in a room at the center. We all joined in the fun. CJ and Annabelle played against other kids. Christian and I played head-to-head. Playing chess was a nice way to kill time while waiting for Detective Cookie herself to arrive. She came about 1:30, and the awards ceremony began shortly thereafter.

Since January, a contest had been running where people of all ages from all over were encouraged to submit designs for a t-shirt to promote the under-construction Detective Cookie Chess Park.

There were lots and lots of entries. Here are just a few. ... 

And then here was the winning one ...

It was drawn by none other than Annabelle! 

Detective Cookie said she and a couple of other people were judges for the contest. She said they loved that the shirt depicted that chess was for all ages, and that it is about helping people. 

It's worth noting that for her design, Annabelle's chess pieces were inspired by a couple of cool statues in the park by artist Peter Reiquam. 

COMEBACK KIDS: Right after the awards ceremony, we had to race north to Magnuson Park, where Annabelle had an Ultimate (Frisbee) game. The league she plays in has rather atrocious "organization," so, as usual, the field they were supposed to play on at 3:45 was being used by other teams.  Fortunately, Annabelle's team and their opponents were able to find a patch of grass to play on. At one point, Bee and her team were down 5-1, but they managed to fight their way back, and the final score was 5-6. It was a sweet victory! 

WORDY: We play tabletop games all of the time, but it seems like I can almost never convince the family to play word games with me. However, they finally relented and were good for a round of Bananagrams this weekend. It's kind of like Scrabble, in that you make words connecting crossword style. Each player starts with 21 tiles, and makes and many words as they can on the table in front of them. You can reject one of your letters and throw it back in the pool of tiles, but you have to draw three more, then. When you run out of tiles, you 'peel' another letter from the pile, and everyone else has to 'peel,' too, The winner is the one who uses all of their letters and there are only a certain amount of tiles left in the pool (three in our game with four players).

Here were a few of CJ's words.

 And below are some of Annabelle's.

It's a fast, fun game.