Pirate Day

Once again we had a theme day, and because international "Talk Like a Pirate Day" is coming up next month I decided we would do something less feminine than last time's Royalty Day.

note the crossed bones on yonder tights

As usual, I altered the normally scheduled events to suit the theme. Therefore we had "Gardening for Landlubbers" and a "Buccaneer Chat" before lunch. For the chat I brought a list of Pirate Lingo for us to discuss after we had exhausted our speculations on the desperateness one must have before turning to such a dangerous lifestyle. Most of the terms involved death or punishment. Some we didn't know were "hornswoggle" (to cheat), "me proud beauty" (pretty woman), "old salt" (experienced sailor), "powder monkey" ( boy in charge of bringing gunpowder to the gunner), and the location of the poop deck (part of the ship fathest to the back, usually above the Cap'n's quarters). A relaxation CD of sailing music became our background for these topics.

After lunch was a "Walk the Plank Calendar Distribution", and "Grog" hydration during which I mixed every flavor of drink we have as if all our barrels were running low and I had to combine them to make it easier to gather and pour.

The afternoon was reserved for a pirate party during which we celebrated August birthdays and achievements. What I really like about theme days is the chance to just have fun and spice things up. If nothing else the residents can admire themselves for surviving another day with a crazy person like me.

Our Booty: "Scurvy Protection" fruit snacks, Life Savers, "Shark Bait" gold fish crackers, and Gold Nuggets

We had some great snacks to get things started. I also got a CD of official pirate movie music to set the mood. Then we set to work making pirate hats out of large sheets of construction paper. I got so good at making them for new comers that I could fold one before getting to the 98 bottles of beer on the wall verse. On our hats we wrote the pirate name we chose for ourselves which happened to include:

• Gold Tooth ______
• Silver Tongue _______
• Dirty Jeans _______
• Ihop Peg-Leg _______
• Barnacle Breath ________
• Red Legs _________
• One-Eyed __________
• ___________ Bones
• ___________ Bucko
• Scarface _Ashley_
• Captain Kidd
• Black ________
• Gangplank _________

Thus costumed we had 13 pirate trivia questions which I asked people to raise their "hook" to answer. When a resident got a correct answer he/she had to root around in the sand like cloud dough for their prize: a chocolate gold coin.

buried treasure

  I won't paste all the trivia questions, but I can say the most interesting thing I learned from the answers was that our romanticized view of pirate lives is partially in due to a poem entitled "The Corsair" (written by Lord Byron).

Finally we made pirate ship cannons out of cut plastic drinking cups and tied off/ cut balloons so that when the tied off balloon part is pulled back, the cannon missile shoots out of the cup. These worked a little too well with mini marshmallows and perhaps I would have been wise to substitute cotton balls.

The day exhausted me but before everyone left to get ready for dinner I used my pirate skull fortune teller to answer questions about their future. Most wanted to know if the meal would be hot, tasty, or followed by a good dessert. 

Did you know? Pirates used eye patches so that one eye was adjusted to the light and worked well on top of the ship and the other eye was adjusted to the darkness when they needed to quickly perform a task or gather materials below.