My Amazing Race Dream

Alright I admit it I'm really quite competitive. (Trust me knowing this will help you understand this post and why it is really quite funny)

Adam and I are leading a small group of newly weds (and one engaged couple) for a second time this year. WE LOVE TEACHING NEWLY WEDS (I'll write more on it later). Every Sunday we have a lesson and then on Wednesday night everyone comes over to our place to go over the material a little deeper and have fun time in community.

On Sundays we've always played little get to know ya games or team building games. And I admit last semester Adam and I did not have a good attitude about these games. And most Sundays just sat around with our group and talked. BUT this semester!!!!! They made the 8 weeks a competition between small groups and the winning team will ACTUALLY win a "major award" at the end of our time together. Plus there's a super lame but oh so cool trophy that gets passed around to the group who is in the lead each week (that trophy has never left our table, but more on that later).

So Adam and I are super competitive with each other and others around us. So when someone created a game with points all of a sudden those kind of lame games BECAME FREAKIN' AWESOME. And our small group is UBER cool and love the competition as much (and sometimes more) than we do.

SOOOOOO this morning there was a scavenger hunt around Austin. We (Adam & I) weren't going to compete at first, but at the last moment we decided to play. We had been prepping our small group for a week about this scavenger hunt and felt like we could totally do it too. I mean come on just because we have 4 kids and EVERYONE else is a newly wed couple with no kids doesn't mean we won't have a chance, RIGHT???? We packed the kids up, loaded up a million snacks, talked to the boys about the "treasure hunt" we were going on, and headed to the first spot. We got our clues and it was game on. Unfortunately for us we don't know much about Austin and every clue was a location on the north side of the river and we live on the south (the COOL side) on town. So we began internet-ing, tweeting, and mapping out the spots. Once we had a plan we took off. Once in a while we saw one of our couples along the way, and we gave them a high five and a friendly threat that they better not let us (WITH OUR 4 KIDS) beat them. On our way to one of the hardest destinations we got the message from one of our couples that they had WON! Perfect timing for us because we were trying to figure out how we were going to get 4 kids up to the top of Mt Bonnell, a 105 stair walk straight up 785 feet above sea level. We knew that only the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place teams got points so we headed to the last check-in. When we arrived we learned that 2 other couples from our team had finished 3rd and 4th. (GO TEAM)

We had a blast, but learned why you DO NOT get to take kids on Amazing Race. 1) They have to go to the bathroom at inconvenient times. 2) They want lunch at 11:15am, NO matter what you are doing. 3) They don't like getting woken up from a little nap to run out and get a picture taken with a tree(we have a picture but I can't post it cause J-man is in it grrrrr). 4) It really does hurt your time when you have to unbuckle and buckle 4 kids into car seats at every destination.

My dream to compete in the Amazing Race is not dead and I feel like Adam and I only proved how totally AWESOME we would be on the show. Right?