I mentioned the other day some of the cute events the three and four year old kids did at Anthony's preschool's annual sports festival. Last week, prior to the festival, I was sort of lamenting to Anthony about how he was growing up, and how the sports day was so cute when he was younger, but now he's getting big, and is in the oldest class (kids who were five years old when the school year started in April; Anthony turns six tomorrow).

He said something along the lines of “Yeah, when I was little the events were cute, but now they're cool!”.

Mixing shots from different heats (different sets of kids), I'll describe their “obstacle course” type event....

It started off with some bamboo that they had to walk across...

At the end, they had to pick up a basket, fill it with three cloth balls, then cross the finish line.

It was always cute to watch them cross the finish line. Anthony's class is mostly girls (22 vs. 8), which lead to a lot of long hair flying along with the big grins everyone had...

At almost six years old, one might think that kids are old enough to think ahead a bit, but alas, that kind of judgement doesn't start to come until they hit their 30s or 40s. 🙂    In the next shot, Anthony is approaching a basket behind Kana-chan, apparently not thinking that perhaps she will take the basket that she's headed directly for....

There were three baskets for the three kids, so, being behind the other two, he had little choice in which basket to get...

But as I've said before, the day is all about fun, so there were no losers, only winners, and everyone had a fun time regardless of when they crossed the finish line.

Anthony's big-kid class also had a full relay, where each kid on the three teams did one lap around the field. Most took about 16 seconds.

Anthony runs around a lot and so people just assume that he's fast at it, but he's never been particularly good at sports. (He takes after me in this respect, I guess, although I did blossom a bit as I got older, playing Ultimate Frisbee with friends at Yahoo!.) The opening shot of this post is the start of the relay, where the other two beat Anthony handily. The girl in that shot, Jyuri-chan (sounds like “Julie-chan”), is pretty amazing at the preschool gymnastics that Anthony goes to, and is more flexible than a newborn.

Still, I thought Anthony looked pretty darn cool anyway. Perhaps (just perhaps) I'm biased.

The most shocking moment of the day was when Kana-chan (seen a few shots above heading Anthony off at a basket, and many times in my blog in the past) absolutely lit up the track with shocking, jaw-droppingly amazing speed clearly in a different class than all the other kids...

Kana-chan's inhuman speed, combined with a killer final leg from the very speedy Nana-chan, more than compensated for Anthony's slow start, and the red team cruised in for the win...

Even though Anthony's not in it, that last shot is probably my favorite of the day.... well, behind this one taken after it was all over.

Anyway, as always, there were “yeah!” cheers by the winning team, but not the slightest negative feeling from the other kids. Just getting to be here and do these fun things in front of everyone makes them all winners, and so crossing the line first is just a momentary extra icing on the cake.