Friday?

Then the day arrived that for the purposes of this missive will be called Friday. The reason for this would be because it came right after Thursday. The reason to be exact on this was that I had been busy all week and I wanted to be sure I called it the right day and/or that I knew what I was talking about. The problem with that is that just knowing what day I was talking about still didn’t mean I knew what I was talking about. Hopefully that cleared up the reason why I called the day Friday. It is a wonder that I even remember it, considering it was almost a week ago.

Previously written stuff spoke of what we were busy doing this past week and this was further intensified by YD and her young ones being with us most of the week due to her husband being out of town for training. What then was different about this Friday? It was the evening of our church’s Fall Festival – held every year on the Friday before Halloween for the enjoyment of the young ones associated with the church.

This brings us to one of my several quirks. For years now I have come up with games for parties and/or children’s church. The children and even sometimes the older ones seemed to enjoy these and I enjoyed them enjoying them. For these games I have quite a collection of odds and ends items with which to play said games. A few of the game pieces were bought but most were things that would have been thrown away and some that I made with my own two hands.

Probably the largest in population of the game articles is my collection of empty 2-liter Juicy Juice and Gatorade bottles – many different games can be played with these. But I slightly digress, so back to Friday’s large function. It has been our custom to have several large inflatables placed outside for the kids to jump on, slide down, etc. This custom was complicated by rain, so the inflatables had to be brought into the gym and the inside games were then moved into a large room next to this.

After several hours of sitting on babies – that are almost not babies anymore – I left for the church about 4pm with all my equipment for five of the inside games. With volunteers, tables were gathered and the games set up in a fairly quick manner on one end of the room. Other folks had other games set up in the rest of the area and even one just outside in the space left by the inflatables.

With our brief organizational meeting over and volunteers to run the games, we were ready for the fun to begin and shortly it did just that. It was so busy that I didn’t get to check out all the other games, but my games were, 1-roll the tennis balls into the metal rings, 2-bounce the ping pong balls into a group of empty margarine tubs, 3-toss the bottles into the plastic laundry baskets, 4-see how many plastic bottles one could knock down using two tennis balls 5-the shooting gallery, with double-barreled rubber-band guns – which I fashioned several years ago.

There was a massive and constant flow of young ones coming through to play the games. There is just something within me that loves to see these young ones having fun. I was a rover, helping with the games on my end of the room. The game that brought me the most enjoyment was the tossing of bottles into the basket. We had two tables of this and when I could, I would help with one of them. I really got a charge out of watching their eyes light up when they got the bottle to go into the basket.

Working on the basket end of the table, I made sure the bottles did go in by moving the basket to catch the bottle – this was mostly done for the tiny ones or the ones that couldn’t throw very well. I almost got my year’s quota of smiles and bright eyes in one night – but I’m sure I will run low on these sooner or later.

When it came our 8pm closing time, I was one tired, but happy, old man. Doing the Lord’s work sometimes comes in strange packages, like helping kids have fun. ec