An Acquired Taste: The Road to Glory: Blackwell Family Olympics

Who doesn't like a little friendly competition?

Every year at my family reunion we have the Blackwell Family Olympics. This is no joke. Completely serious. It's legit. And it is a big deal.

We've had the games for many years now. A few years have been individual winners, but then we started teams. My cousin Steven and I quickly paired up. This is our story of glory.

2009:

The first year for teams.

The Olympics this year consisted of a giant relay race. We had challenges like: eating a doughnut hanging off a string without using our hands, finding a specific crayon in a bucket of crayons, swimming back and forth between docks in the lake to match up ducks with names on them, filling a tub with water using a sponge, and a few others leading up to......a word scramble.

Let me just tell you that we had a huge lead on every single other team until the word scramble. As soon as we picked up our pencils, we fell apart.

And that's the first year we did not leave victorious.

It was a rough day. And year. Considering we were made fun of for our word scramble failure from then on out.

After a few years of single champions, we are brought to last summer.

2013:

The second year for teams.

We were tired of being the Family Olympics joke. This was our year. We were in it to win it.

The Olympic games this year were individual events with a running total of points. First place in an event received 10 points, second place 9 points, and so on down to last place receiving 1 point. Some of the events included: family trivia, pogo stick, a luck of the roll dice game, bowling, hitting a baseball after spinning around 10 times, water balloon toss, and a few others.

Just like in 2009, we took first in almost every event. The dice game and family trivia were our downfalls this year. However, I would like to add that Tara and Chandler cheated in multiple events.

For the second year, we came in second place.

We'd grown tired of these "fun" family games. We planned on taking a trip to Vegas instead of joining the family in Branson this year.

However, team asthma showed up. Third times a charm, right?

This year I was pretty sick. I was doing a breathing treatment for my asthma every four hours and just couldn't get any energy. The day of the Olympics I slept until 2:15 only to get up to drive over to the site for the games.

Chandler told me I had to pull a Michael Jordan and compete like he did in the legendary "flu game" of the NBA finals.

All of the doubt was in our corner. I was practically dying and Steven has bad asthma as well.

The scoring for the Olympics this year was the same as last year. Individual events with a grand total of points.

We had to complete a 40 piece puzzle. We rocked it and got first place.

We had to balance 3 dice on a spoon without touching them. This was a last team standing event. Despite our perfect zen, we came in last place for this one which really hurt our total points.

We had to complete a Soduku puzzle. I have never been so thankful in my entire life for being a complete nerd in middle school. I did these puzzles for fun. Probably because I didn't have much of a life back then. Oh well. It came in handy because we dominated and took first in this event.

This one we had to use straws and suck to carry a smartie from one end of the table into the jar at the other end. We actually came in third place in this event. After we finished, Steven threw up in his mouth because he couldn't breathe and I had an asthma attack. All in good fun, right?

There were a few other events. For instance, we had to eat an entire box of milk duds then chug a drink, fill up a jar with water by transporting the water with a cup carried only with our mouths, a memory game, and maybe one or two others.

Then the last event......the dreaded word scramble. We just knew that we were done for. We're terrible at word scrambles and we were down in points because of the dice.

BUT WE ROCKED IT. AND WE CAME IN FIRST IN THE WORD SCRAMBLE.

That's right. Sweet, sweet redemption.

However, it wasn't quite enough. By getting first place we tied it up with Tiffany and Alex. We had to go into a tie breaker.

Things just got real.

We had to bounce or throw ping pong balls into a jar a few feet away. The first to make four balls in the jar would take over as champion.

Now everybody would automatically look to Alex and Tiff to easily win this round. I mean, we know how they were in college. This is life size beer pong. (Sorry, guys. Love you.)