the bad, the ugly, and the ocheen ocheen good!

we did this little relay race while at the orphanage in ukraine.

the basic idea was to dress up like this:crawl through this: and end up over there:
where you would proceed to strip off the ugly ladies' clothing and hand it to the next person who'd crawl back through to the next person and so on..


well who should be one of the lucky partakers of this blessed event but yours truly! i thought to myself, "hey, a challenge that i can actually do!" as apposed to the one where you had to cross monkey bars and then do a pull up to try to eat candy that was attached to the bars. i know! there was no way!


i'm not the fastest gal in the world, but still, i thought i could manage. so i waited my turn to make my team proud.


here's where a small problem arose. the elastic wasted floral skit that i was supposed to put on in lightning speed didn't seem to be terribly fond of the idea of fitting over my hips! i stopped for a second, while alena said in her sweet, desperate, heavily accented voice, "please leslie! hurry!", prayed a quick prayer and "oh thank you, Jesus!" with a swift and forceful tug the skirt was fitted nicely around my waste.


the hard part was over(so i thought). i quickly threw the rest of the articles on and dove through the opening in the trash bag tunnel. at this point i felt a sharp pain in my back and heard a multitude of ukrainian gasps follow me, but i didn't look back, nor did i stop to find out what was wrong. i laughed in the face of adversity and quickened my pace to the child waiting at the other end of the tunnel. (thankfully, the skirt came off quicker than it went on!)

so once i had the chance to stop, watch my teammates finish the relay (we won, by the way) i realized that the sharp pain i felt earlier was intensifying quite nicely. a little later i found my mom and showed her my back so i could find out if it was really anything to worry about(the sight of which she gasped in horror).


so here's what happened. i'm going to need some audience participation in order for you to visualize this fully. everyone, take your hand and make it into a fist. now, take a pen or pencil, anything straight like that will work. hold the pen/pencil flat against your pointer finger knuckle (keep your hand in a fist!) and strum it down your knuckles almost like you would on one of those wood blocks. if you do this right it should make a kind of a clicking noise. okay, now imagine that your knuckles where vertebrae (jami, since your on the computer i'm going to safely assume your sitting down...that's good) and the pen is a metal bar and that the human the the vertebrae are a attached to is going at great speed while scraping her vertebrae on the metal bar. sounds fun, doesn't it.


later when i looked at my back, thinking all i would see was scrapes, instead i saw three circles where there was no skin(where each vertebrae scraped). yeah, the best part was that all week people would come up to me and pat me on my lower back! whatever happened to patting on the UPPER back. you know, on the shoulders! doesn't that seem more normal anyway?

but alas, as much as that was bad, this...

and this...

and this...and this...
was ocheen ocheen good!