Silliness --- a contest of strength and skill

This weekend I returned home to NKy for a good friend's bridal shower. Hal stayed in Bloomington so I could return at my leisure on Monday, and in case I got snowed in.

While home, my sister, her boyfriend, and I watched a movie together.

But before the movie, we engaged in a little competition with each other.

Who could jump rope the most times with my sister's scarf?

Let me tell you, there are few things I should be doing less than jumping rope. My knees pop and give out and I generally feel lots of pain in the legs from jumping around. However, I'm always up to a good challenge, so when sister's boyfriend, Pete, started jumping rope, I had to try to beat him.

And beat them I did! I jumped for a grand total of 13 hops before I got the scarf caught on my head. Of course, during the jumping, something popped in my ankle and I felt a hot, liquid pain shoot through my foot. But it's ok, because I won! And after I finished, I fell to the ground and couldn't get up for awhile.

Pete was disadvantaged because he is tall and so he had to duck to get the scarf to go over his head. Jennie was disadvantaged because she just simply wasn't very good. I was brilliant! And later, I even jumped 15 times!

I used to jump rope as a kid quite a bit. First of all, jumping rope was allegedly supposed to make my feet faster for sports -- and everyone knows I need all the extra speed I can get. Also, a group of professional jumpropers, or something, come to my school once and did all sorts of tricks, and I thought it was awesome. And on the playground, we often jumped rope and sang silly little songs. Sometimes we played in some sort of strange reverse limbo, in which we would jump over the rope as it got progressively higher. One thing I could never do, however, was double-dutch. I do not have the coordination for that.

However, jumping rope wasn't the thing I was best at. My talent was left for ... the HULA HOOP! I was amazing at hula hoop and once beat everyone in the second grade during Olympic Day at my school in the hula hooping contest (don't worry, I was also in second grade -- this wasn't last year or anything). I believe that there might be a story in which I was taught to hula hoop by a waitress in some bar and grill in some city -- Dad, you need to remind me of this story.

Along with the hoop and the rope, I often did the Skip It. For those of you unlucky enough to never have a Skip It, it was a plastic thing pictured here:

To work it, you put one foot in the looped end and then spun the thing around so the ball would run along the ground. Then you would jump over it with your other foot. The Skip It had a counter on the ball part so it counted how many times you were able to spin it around. It was amazing, and I spent many hours with it attached to my foot.

I suspect that I would lose a Skip It contest to Jennie and Pete simply because I have not the stamina to jump over it for that long. Hula Hoop might fare better for me, assuming I have not forgotten, in my old age, how to Hula. I suspect that I would, however, rise to the top!

So this leads me to a question:

What silly non-sport games did you engage in as a child (or recently)?