Easter Weekend

I lost my camera, but found my camera! Life is looking up again! ;-) Easter festivities for me always start at my workplace with dyeing of eggs and the Easter Party and Hunt. This first picture is one of my better ones, capturing the ambiance of the event.

The parents are all standing around with their cameras and helping their own kid find eggs (12 was our goal this year), and then the kids are frantically trying to get as many as they can. The eggs are not really hidden, but it's fun. :-)

We had to delay a lot of our at home activities because of LTC. This is a church of Christ UIL-type event where the kids work on all kinds of projects and activities and then get graded on them. They get awarded gold, silver or bronze awards. They are not graded against each other, just on their own performance and effort.

J did Bible Class Teaching (a pre-convention project), Drama, and Chorus.

B did Service Challenge (a pre-convention project) and Bible Bowl. With BB you get graded on individual score (B got a gold!!) and your team score.

But our adventure started on Friday---we left town for Houston about noon-thirty. When we got to our Hilton Hotel, they didn't have the rooms we wanted, so we ended up in a King room with a rollaway for our family of 4. Not ideal, but B can sleep with Lar and I in the king bed. The guys room----4 teens and a young chaperone---were in an adjoining suite. J is lounging on the fold-out couch in there with a Wii in his hand.

Ah! But there was ONLY the fold out couch in there, along with a dining area and a view and little kitchen. One bed for 2 and nothing else! we needed room for 5 guys. This was a very nice room! But it was not what we needed, still! So we were moved to another room, and for our trouble, we got free breakfast and "evening orderves" which we couldn't eat because we had activities for the kids at that time. Our room was exactly like the other one, but we wanted our room near the other room.

Here is B going out the window of the suite---not really! That's the convention center in the background there. This was on floor 18?

This evening, the first event for us was the chorus. I don't know our score yet---they're getting mailed to the church. Here is our group, though. The guy in the blue shirt is their coach--he's our young chaperone! :-) The kids are in 10th, 4th, 6th, and 10th grades. Only the guy on the right can sing a "part" so far----I am hoping someone will help Jamie learn to sing tenor, but the coach here says Jamie already has a Bass range. Huh!! imagine that!

Also Friday night was Bible Bowl. We had 2 High schoolers who were happy to have B on their team, but B got registered as a 3rd grader, so they lost her for their team. B had to join up with another team from another congregation, one from Austin area, I think.

Here she is with her block. She had to point the correct answer towards the judge for each question.

Here is her team. That boy is cheesing it up for me isn't he? B was in the back. They sit in teams of four, one at each table. They do two rounds. B's age group did 35 questions each round. This year's theme was I Samuel. She got 30 out of 35 in the first round, the one that counted for her individual score. 29-35 was a gold award. We sat at the back, watching her cube from the wrong side, and watching the judge sitting at the front of her row. The judge would hold up a card telling how many on the team got the answer right. Only a few times did we see a zero!

After B got done at about 9:00, we took her back to the room. I wanted to get her on to bed. Larry watched basketball, and the rest of the kids went to a big devo. One of the teen guys came back and watched bball with us ( men's college hoops!) and J played games in the "guys" room. Curfew came, we got our son back, sent the other guy to his room across the hall, and it was lights out.

I must say, it was very comfortable, especially considering B was between Lar and I. The pillows worked for me! I usually wake up a lot, but I slept pretty well.

Up again at 6:30 to shower and eat that free breakfast. It was kinda fancy, and again, in a room with a nice view. The food wasn't fancy, but the room was nice with couches to relax upon and big flat-screen TVs.

Our drama was set to go at 8:30 a.m. The older girl in our group wrote it. The theme was "Here Am I" like Samuel said to God once he knew he was being called. I made a video. :-) For it to upload on webshots, it had to be less than 5 minutes, so I am uploading the 4:59 video. It cuts off only the wrap-up part----where they each say something like "God calls us, too, and you should follow Him where he leads."

Here's a link. I don't know if the one I am trying to upload to Blogger is going to work! http://family.webshots.com/video/3041754490042314581TCOnwW?vhost=family

And here is the second part, the end of the skit.

Here's our drama group. We took 8 kids with us this year, and a few more kids did pre-convention events. 7 of those kids were in the skit---just B wasn't! Lar helped to coach.

We were all done with events after that. B and I looked through all the bulletin boards, scrapbooks, art projects (both 3-D and 2-D) and children's books. There are so many ways the kids could express themselves. I love that.

Here are our Easter pictures. We took them right after church. We did every possible combination of family members you can imagine. I didn't pull out the tripod!

Do you like the dress? B and I went in a dressing room with about 8 dresses and came out with this one. She is so slender, some of the ones in her size are too big around. The ones in a size smaller were too short for her. She has grown up this year, but not "out." The little sundresses were gaping in front and back on some of them! This one was nice. Green seems to be "the" color this year.

How tall will J get?? Is he done growing for a while??
We did an egg hunt for the kids in the living room. I hid 37 eggs (I think) and they found 35. Hmmm . . . did I miscount or will we find some later? None of them were boiled eggs!!
We dyed eggs Sunday afternoon also. Those went to the refrigerator for eating!

Beautiful egg, B!!
Even I have to get in on it. I boiled 3 dozen, and we ended up with 11 each to dye.
Today B got her results on her TAKS test---she got a "commended performance," which means she scored well and will get to go on to 4th grade! ;-) Like I was worried. She missed two in all. Very good!!

Here's the skit video! I think!