Friday, July 17, 2009

Vacation Bible School Highlights

This year I had the priviledge of leading a team to help teach the kids a few songs for Vacation Bible School. Brian (a father of some of the VBS kids) played the guitar and sang with me and George played the jimbay (a type of drum) to make our music more "Safari-sounding" as the theme for the week was "Prayer Safari." I found out only a few days before VBS started that I was pregnant, and of course the week of, I found myself battling some morning sickness first thing when I woke up each day. Thankfully, it was manageable and by the time I arrived at the church I was feeling better, but it was a real struggle to get up and get everyone ready each day. I was blessed that my hubby was able to help on some of the days to get the kiddos in the car and/or help feed them, etc. when I was feeling especially sick. God is good and it was a lot of fun to lead the kiddos in song each day. There were around 280 kids at our VBS, which was huge! The age range was 4 year olds through 6th graders. I taught 3 songs throughout the week with motions that went with them and that seemed to be just the right amount for the time we were given. I lead the songs for 15 minutes at the beginning and the end of each day and during the in between times I went down to see the twins in the nursery and assist the nursery workers a bit. The twins got in the habit of taking a nap there each day and so sometimes during that time, I would make my way out to check on Josiah in his class or go grab a snack in the room for the volunteers.

Finally on the last day of VBS, I got around to taking some pictures. They had the bouncy house up that day and I just put my camera in and starting taking random shots that I wasn't able to see until I looked at them later. This was a nice candid of Josiah jumping and having fun.

This picture was just too funny of the 3 boys falling in a big heap together. My camera just flashed at the exact right moment!

Around the edges of the bouncy house, they had various stations of toys to play with. This big box of Legos was very popular with Josiah and he had fun creating things with all the other boys. I only saw one girl come and play with the Legos and I think perhaps she came over because I was sitting there. It was cute though to watch them all play.

Here is Caleb boy in the nursery playing with the trains. Josiah is here because he was having a bad day in his class. The whole week he struggled with the times where they were supposed to sit still and listen. This is a skill we have obviously not honed in him very well and being the active boy that he is, we will have a lot of work to do to get him to comply in this area. This showed us though the need to work with him more at home and we will do so and hope that the next event will be better.

Daniel was very pleased with himself that he could climb up onto the slide and slide down by himself. He did this several times with an ear to ear grin on his face. Oh and another lovely side note...all three of the boys ended up having strep throat this week (though I didn't know it until day 2) and thankfully, we worked out a deal where the babies were able to be in a different room from the rest of the group for the week. I had strep throat the week before and was watching them closely ever since, but they really weren't showing any symptoms. My only clue was that Daniel wasn't wanting to sleep (and he is usually my good sleeper) and both the twins were super fussy on Monday night. I took them into the doctor and she looked them over and gave them a strep test as well just in case. She told me that if she hadn't seen the test to be positive, she would have sent me home with nothing as she did not see ANYTHING to indicate strep throat. Isn't that weird? Anyway....I ended up taking Josiah on Tuesday after VBS as a precaution and he too had it, but didn't show any real sign of it physically. Josiah spent Wednesday with me and the boys in the separate nursery, but then he was allowed back in his class the following day because he had been on antibiotics for 24 hours, and that would be the policy if he was going to school. I sincerely hope that noone got strep throat from my boys that week...I really felt it was a spiritual attack that this all happened this week. I was very pleased with how the staff at Bethany Baptist handled it all though and am glad I could still volunteer despite all these challenges.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow! What great news about the baby!! You have placed your order for a girl this time, right? Just to even things out a little? Congratulations and keep us all posted. Larraine in SC