Paid in full! Thanks, duct tape girl.

I tend to get really excited over rather ridiculous things, like free coffee, an open lane at Wal-Mart, or no wait at my favorite places to eat, that gets me excited. I love to find a bargain and think I'm getting a steal, like a shirt I found for $4 the other day, I was giddy. Well, I'm excited because my little piece of internet history has hit the 1,000 mark on views to my "meaningless" blog full of meaning and memory to me. I would give something away, but I don't have anything to offer. I can fold a foil gum wrapper into a boat, any takers? Mildred has had something like a million views a day ever since she was discovered by another blogger. Well deserved and about time because she actually has something to offer and some really cool stuff to see, me I'm just ranting and rambling on about things in my life that I find to be of interest.


With summer having me in a choke hold until late August, I fear I won't be able to post with the veracity that I once did, which is a relief to many, but I do miss it. I'm also using my posting time to help a friend of mine get photos posted on her blog. She is working as a missionary in Peru and the Internet cafes they go to for their email and Internet fixes have bizarre keyboards, and Spanish too. She said the grammar and punctuation keys are not in their usual places and other things to make writing more readable are hard to find. I kind of chuckle because I am notoriously bad and punctuation and grammar and know exactly where every stinking key on the keyboard is!

We just wrapped up our first summer activity, the Quest program for a Christian University in Edmond, Oklahoma. I had a sneaking hunch that we were in for an interesting experience when I found out that the scheduled activities didn't start for children until 6 and weren't over until 10 PM! Add to that the fact that the last day of school was the very day we were having this thing. Kind of like hurricane forecasters looking at patterns of weather and knowing it's going to be a booger, well I saw all of the signs of disaster and knew it was coming.

None the less I pressed on and made my plans to fill the night with four hours of action-packed fun and meaning. I chose to base all of the evenings events on, "God is out of control" particularly our control. The first big game we did was a stuffed pants race. The kids took a pair of men's sweats and stuffed them with paper until they looked like sumo wrestlers, then they had to run around the theater we were using on the campus and first one back won. The kids loved it! After that game we went to our stations that I had set up for them to do: science wow, game, craft, snack, and a sit down and chat station. Oh...we had six kids show up, I prepared for 50 and had 12 volunteers on hand. The kiddos were...going to be spoiled.

The second big game we did after our break was the best. This game made me laugh harder than I have ever laughed in my life--for real! The idea was to get one of the kids from each of the four groups represented (we broke the kids up in groups to send them around to the stations, it's eats up a lot of time to move groups from one station to another) and wrap them in duct tape, sticky side out. Most of the kids were wrapped just around their arms, one girl was wrapped head to toe, like a mummy! It was actually shoulder to toe with the bottom torso slightly wrapped.

On, "go" the kids would drop on the floor and roll around picking up candy that had been scattered, the one who picked up the most candy was the winner, easy enough, huh. As the kids dropped to the floor and began to roll, the girl with the head to toe wrapping turned sideways to roll when she did that she hit another girl--STUCK! These girls were completely stuck together and couldn't budge. "I'm stuck...ouch...I'm stuck" "Get off of me I'm trying to roll in candy! Move!" "I'm stuck. I'm stuck." This girl was stating the obvious, but we were kind of waiting to see what would happen next...when it did. She kicked her legs hoping to get a good jolt to free herself and SMACK! She stuck to another kid. Now, not only was she stuck to a girl at her head, she was stuck to a boy at her feet. I was doubled over on the floor with tears rolling down my face. Watching these kids try to get unstuck from each other was too much. (I'm waking up Teensy as I type because I'm still laughing out loud about the very thought of this.)

I have some pictures of the whole thing, I'll post those when I get to my computer at work and download. It was totally great, worth the two months of planning and 10 hours of my busy summer--paid in full!

Working with kids is an awesome adventure and well worth all of the pain that comes along because you are gifted with things like the duct tape girl sticking to her other challengers and all of that stress just rolls away. There are other deeper things that keep me going, but they aren't nearly as funny. That's why I have been at this for almost twenty years (19th summer).