After hearing from my parents all summer long about the painting/decorating bonanza that has been transforming their church's childrens' wing from drab to fab (hey, it's all I could come up with), our little family finally made it to the Saturday evening service on the big 'revealing' weekend. However, not smoothly. After reminding the Husband that we had evening plans and then declining his offer to take us out to eat (yes, I'm that cheap) we managed to leave around six ten to get to the service at six thirty. Unfairly, after telling Husband several times that yes, it started at six thirty, we arrived just beforehand to learn that this was the first weekend of the new 6:00pm start time. Drat. How does he happen to be right when all the time he had no idea what he was talking about?! Ah, well.
Because we arrived late I decided to keep the kids in the service with us instead of letting them go to class together (it would have been their first time - not the way to make an entrance when you're already new and shy). Happily, they sat through the next hour pretty quietly and fairly still. Boy One distracted himself by drawing airplanes on the sermon notes. We even got to sing "All to Jesus I Surrender," which I haven't sung in ages. Yay!
The Children's hallway was amazing. I have pictures, but alas, they are still in the camera. (Aside: when I finally get those pictures out of the camera there will be a long, random post explaining them all.) My kids' favorite part was obviously the slide into the classroom - they did this at least twenty times apiece (as did every other child present). But I happen to enjoy the times we visit their church because it feels so familiar: my dad always seems genuinely thrilled that we are there and introduces and reintroduces us to everyone. There are actually people there that are the ages of my husband and I (amazing!) and many of them have been to college/seminary - even the ones that we attended! It's nice not to feel invisible at church.
On Sunday, our church switched from summer hours to normal hours and began Sunday School classes for the year. The boys are in class together again, but Girl is back downstairs with the younger kids because of a change-up in class sizes. Except for minor incidents with Boy One not wanting to participate in a few of his class activities, the kids performed adequately.
But the great icing on the weekend was the horses! A family at our church recently purchased two miniature horses for their farm and generously brought them to church so that we could all share in the joy. Girl decided to stay with the horses for as long as they were there (they were just her size, after all - she's already claimed the buckskin horse as her own), covering herself completely in dirt but not caring in the slightest: there were horses at church, who cares about a little dirt?! (This sounds much more reasonable if you don't realize that our church is right across the street from a horse ranch.) Boy Two was only a little frightened, which I took as a good sign. Boy One didn't really care that much: he's more of a dog boy.
As a tag on to the end of this post, Boy Two was randomly flipping through my Bible this morning and brought it to me. "Could you read your Bible to me? I don't know what the words are." So we found his favorite story, Daniel in the Lion's den, and I read that to him. Then he found an old picture Bible and sat down with it on the couch, saying "I have some reading to do." So sweet. Love that boy.
No comments:
Post a Comment