Ok, I’m supposed to go quickly, but I had to write this in the heat of the moment (even if the moment just passed).

Ok, so last week at AWANA was Grand Prix night (for those of you poor people who have never been to AWANA in your life, the Grand Prix is where you build cars out of small blocks of wood and on Grand Prix night you race them), which makes this week at AWANA Second-Chance night, at which in game-time you get to race your car again as many times as you want (and as time will allow). I used to think that Grand Prix night was the most chaotic night in all of AWANA; I was wrong.

Tonight everyone was so hyper; council time was loud, story time was full of interruptions, handbook time was…well I’ll get to that…, and game time was slightly under control.

Handbook time, handbook time, it used to be the best part of the day. Everyone was quiet, we recited verses from the handbooks that the kids memorized, and I was happy. Tonight, everything changed.

I normally have three, sometimes four, kids at my table (and all of them are fast at going through their books, so the verses they say are equivalent to about five kids instead of three). Today I had six at my table. I went through the first two just fine, and then something within those sweet little girls cracked and they went crazy. I was trying to help another girl with her sections but she was distracted by all of the other girls who were climbing on and under the table, running around the room, asking each other weird questions, and trying to steal my cool “Operation” pen (guess what’s not coming back to AWANA?). I was constantly looking up from the book and yelling, “Jade, sit down” “Naomi, be quieter so that people can say their verses” “Girls, stop drawing those gross pictures” “Zoogaplath, stop jumping on my head”!

Well, I finally got through the handbook time and tried my best to put the girls’ books into the right bags and get them into the room where they would be picked up in. Then I rushed up to game-time.

Usually the Kindergarteners are split up from the 1^st and 2^nd graders, but with the racetrack out we couldn’t do that. So the blue team (my team) was too full. But then all kids with cars that wanted to race got to go and race so there were only about five kids left. “This is nice” I said to myself and I started a game of “Sparky says”. Then a bunch of kids were done racing and came back and we all played dodge ball.

Dodge ball, dodge ball, who came up with that game? Tell me so that I can have a serious talk with that person, please, I promise I’ll try not to hurt him (or her). The kids were wild, running everywhere chasing after the balls so that they could through them, “Kids, stay out of the middle of the circle, those balls can roll, they’ll come to you.” “Stop fighting, it’s just a stupid ball.” “Zoogaplath, stop jumping on Henry’s head!” (Zoogaplath likes to jump on heads, in case you haven’t noticed). So yeah, all of my team was running around, asking me if they could go into the middle next, while I was trying to be organized and go tallest to shortest. How can I do that with all of the kids running around? I did as best as I could.

After game time I went over to my sister (who works with the Kindergarteners) and our friend, Melody. When I got there I said hi, and they said, “I’m not dead!” “I’m still breathing!” I felt exactly the same way.

So then I helped the kids get signed out and off with their parents, all the while Zoogaplath jumped on my head. Once the last kid had left I cleaned up and found someone’s shoes! “How can someone leave their shoes behind?!?!?!?!?!?” I asked myself. So then I ran all around asking people, “is this your shoe?” I finally found the owner and finally could go home! YEA!

Oh yeah, one more thing, I asked people if they’d had any trouble with Zoogaplath all day, everyone looked at me funny. I see him every week, how can anyone miss him? I think I need to go to bed now…I just hope that I don’t have dreams about invisible people only I can see jumping up and down on my head…

G’night,
~SeaChel

Ok, from the title you probably think that this is about trying to find the perfect place for a clubhouse, or maybe that we were looking into buying one of those small houses that they sometimes have in catalogs. Well, if you did you were wrong. That's way too normal for me; no, I went looking for our old "clubhouse", which is actually a clump of trees on our property that my sisters and I cleared out a bit to make it a clubhouse.

It would have gone better if I had been there within the last year, which I hadn't. See, we have a 5 acre property, but most of it is wild; no lawn, just weeds, wild grasses and bushes, and the occasional pile of deer doo-doo. There are also a few clumps of trees on the property, and a year ago my sisters and I cleared out a bunch of branches and called it our clubhouse. It actually had everything, a first floor, a second floor (which was actually just a little bit up the hill, not above the first floor really), a basement (same as the second floor, only downhill instead of uphill), a "forest" in the yard (a part of the tree clump that we decided to leave alone because of a hole that we thought (and still think) might be a coyote or bobcat den), and a whole lot of exits in case of "emergency".

Well, a friend came over yesterday and we decided to explore the property; which I hadn't done in over a year (not exaggerating, at least a whole year). We walked around along with my youngest sister and then we decided to go to the clubhouse. Since it had been over a year ago we got the loppers to help us clear away unneeded brush.

As I mentioned earlier, we have a few tree clumps on our property. I thought that I remembered the right one, the one closest to our house, so we went there. Once we got there we looked around for one of our many entrances. We couldn’t find the main one, but we did find one of the “emergency” exits, which was slightly overgrown with mini-blackberry bushes. We cut through the thorns and went in for a little bit when I thought, Whoa, this is really different. It’s only been a year, so how could this place have changed so much?

Finally, we decided that this was NOT the right tree clump.  We got out of there and headed for the next one, when I saw another one of my other sisters (Starlight) outside. I asked her where she thought the clubhouse was and she pointed to the one behind the one that we had just looked at. So we headed there, I really thought that our clubhouse was closer to the house, but I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to look.

Apparently, my sister’s memory is better than mine, for sure enough we found it!

Nathan (the friend that had come over), my youngest sister, and I cleared out the unwanted bush that had grown in, but like I thought, a year hadn’t done too much to it. Now hopefully I will remember where it is from now on!