The motto this week has been, "Just keep moving! If we stop to sit, we'll fall asleep!" Having just come home from Mount Hermon sleep deprived and laundry-laden, we jumped right into our church's week of VBS. Once again, Dave and I led rotations of students through Bible adventures. We had the kids join the Roman Centurion's army, watch Lazarus get raised from the dead, follow in Jesus' sad footsteps from the Garden of Gethsemane to the cross, get surprised by the bright light of the angel at the empty tomb and go fishing on the Sea of Galilee. We love how experiential the Bible lessons are and see lots of excitement from the students engaging in them, but the work of gathering props, rewriting lessons that just don't work, setting/cleaning up a classroom that's been transformed into something like the Sea of Galilee and memorizing lines is just plain exhausting. This year we realized that only about a third of the kids we get at VBS are members of our church, so the pressure to perfectly present these important Gospel stories to kids who've maybe never heard them was especially strong. (Yay for the power of the Holy Spirit, right?) We're more than ready to have a quiet week at home and plan to do lots of breathing and not much else.
Our VBS theme of "Sky: Anything is Possible with God" had an aviation-themed dress up day. Here are the flying things Ella and Delia decided to dress up as: a superhero and a fairy (note the pixie dust pouch necklace Ella came up with). It's the only VBS picture I took all week.
Besides catching up from Mount Hermon and being involved with VBS, we still had all the regular stuff goin' on. I hosted Book Group at my house, we had 2 parties and all our regular lessons, meetings and obligations. This one birthday party for Delia's preschool friends was really great. She flew down a giant inflatable water slide about 500 times. And it was the first party we've ever been to where we were told to bring a gender-neutral gift costing about $10. The gifts were all swapped around in an adorable grab bag game and each child actually went home with a present! The mom told me she way preferred this to her birthday kids getting a load of presents they didn't need. I'm filing away this great idea!
And then there's this. When a friend recently advertised that they were ready to find their swing set a new home, we couldn't let the opportunity pass! We knew how much the girls would love it and it was a playground the perfect size for us. Our friends delivered it in big pieces this week and we've been working hard each afternoon to level ground, build a retaining wall for it, sink its posts in concrete and assemble it with fresh bolts. We still need to stain it and get some gravel for our new playground area, but the girls are absolutely thrilled. They were decorating it with VBS kites before we even had it all the way up and have spent every available hour outside swinging and sliding! The new-to-us swing set has added a lot of work to an already busy week, but it's totally worth it to get a gently used and mostly built set brought right to our house for next to nothing.
And now I'm gonna put on some jammies and stay in them until next Friday! :)
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