Carnival for Life

The Sunday before Hurricane Sandy, we attended a "Carnival for Life" at a local Catholic church. Everyone who attended brought donations to be given to the local pregnancy center.  The people in attendance were very generous and I could tell it was a cause that was close to many people's hearts. 

The kids were encouraged to wear a costume for the carnival.  Our girls this year for Halloween were the Ingalls girls from Little House on the Prairie. Jillian and Faith's matching dresses were inspired by the show in Season 1 "Country Girls" when Ma uses beautiful fabric to surprise Mary and Laura with matching dresses for their presentation.  (Check it out on You Tube. It is a sweet, sweet episode.)

And of course we had to have our own little Carrie too! Our "Carrie" was exhausted and fell asleep on the way to the carnival.

But thankfully Anna perked up once we got there, especially when she realized that there was candy involved in going to a carnival! 

She was a little mesmerized by her fireball (which we did not let her have at ANY time).

The girls played the cake walk a couple of times but didn't win.  Bummer! :-( The good news is the proceeds raised from the cake walk all went to the pregnancy center! 

We ran into some friends from church who were dressed as Bible characters. Brad and I had fun trying to guess the Bible characters by their props and quickly guessed Mary, David, John the Baptist....

Unfortunately, we had a super hard time figuring out the character of the boy with the beard and the green sash.  His props were not nearly as obvious as his brothers, so his mom gave us a clue, his character's name started with a "J".  

Brad and I started down the list..."Jeremiah, Josiah, Joshua, Joel, Job, Jonathan...JONAH!"  With each name Brad and I grew in our confidence and thought to ourselves, "Wow, we are amazing Bible scholars here. We know lots of "J" names!" :-)

Next thing you know, they tell us, "It's a New Testament character".  For some reason, the beard made us think of "old" like the "OLD TESTAMENT".  But that was okay, we we were on the right track now and we could totally do it. So we began again, "John, James, JUDE...." 

They stopped us there, "It's the most obvious Bible character."  

It was both funny and a little humbling that we missed the most important Bible character that begins with the letter "J"....JESUS! 

But our kind friend made us feel better when she said to us, "It would have been more obvious if he was holding a cross!" 

Jillian told me the cutest thing, "Mommy, we are the ONLY prairie girls any place that we go...that's pretty neat."

The girls had fun playing the bean toss.

Anna being the clever girl that she is, just walked right up to the game...

And threw them in!

The girls had fun doing some fishing too! It honestly reminded me of a scene from Little House on the Prairie! 

The Carnival of Life was a sweet time of fun for our family and for a very worthy cause!