Monday, August 16, 2004 - VBS Begins

While many of my readers have children that have already headed off to school, we still have about 3 weeks before the kiddies head back here. But in the meantime, as I have mentioned several times already we have Vacation Bible School! Yay!

I ended up with 20 1st- and 2nd-graders in my class. It's a lot of kids to manage. With the daily schedule as it is, with no more than 20 minutes in any time block, it's very much like herding sheep. But it seems to be a good group, with no obviously psychologically damaged kids in it this time (I got a couple doozies 2 years ago).

I had this crazy idea that bowing up 64 balloons for a game that would last 10 minutes was a good idea. The balloons themselves: I was smart enough to get a little balloon hand pump so I wouldn't have to blow them up by hand. But then I transported them to church. I filled 7 garbage bags with the silly things and packed them into my car. The game setup was funny too - my helper and I took everything outside since the weather was nice and we dumped the balloons out. This would have been great except that there was the tiniest little breeze... I had to leave the helper there to be balloon wrangler until the kids came out. So we started the game, and the 1st half went ok, but then the second half just devolved. It was supposed to be a quiz game about the Bible story we had told the kids earlier that day. Nobody was getting the questions right. I think my co-teacher (who told today's story) must not have gotten their attention. Oh, well. We'll try to do better tomorrow.

Rascal is in one of the classes. I asked him if he had fun and he said, "Not really, but I want to go back tomorrow." He is such a hoot! Zipper is spending the week being looked after in the church nursery. From what I heard, sometimes he's happy, sometimes he isn't. I know he is in good hands though, so I'm not too worried.