Slumber(less) party

We hosted a sleep-over last night for the Good News Club and Friday night club kids, but allowed them to bring friends too. The kids came between 7 and 7.30, with all their stuff, and the rest of the evening was utter chaos and noise, until about 12.30 when we finally fell asleep. We were all together in the schoolroom until about 10.30, I think, and then the girls wanted to put their pyjamas on, so we went home and stayed there. The schoolroom part was pretty horrible, really, although the kids seem to enjoy the pandemonium. The older girls were looking very bored and unimpressed at one point, so I took them into the church and we played a game of clicking fingers, slapping knees and clapping hands, and calling out numbers. Then we did some other little activities, before drifting back into the schoolroom. By then Nick was playing his guitar and drum machine very loudly, adding to the general noise, but the children thought it was cool. We put a video on in the church around the time the girls left, so the boys were left to watch it. I don’t really know what happened with the boys after that, but I do know that Caleb and Aaron got to sleep at about midnight, being very wide-awake all evening. On my side, with the girls, it was pretty difficult being the only authority and counsellor, with 19 girls. That’s right, 19. Aunty Lynn this and Aunty Lynn that, until the time came for lights out. Everyone had issues with something – no place to sleep, I can’t find my shoes, where’s my sleeping bag, the other girls are taking too long in the bathroom, I can have something to drink?, I’m bored, and so on. It just went on and on and on. Shame, one girl has some very bad eczema, and she’s such a dear little girl, so I applied some of our eczema cream and prayed for her. She was still itchy later when I was washing dishes in the kitchen (the first of about a million instances of washing dishes), so I started telling her the story of Peter Rabbit, as far as I could remember from the Beatrix Potter book and the movie! Her older sister (who is very caring and protective) joined us, and then some more girls came in and listened, all sitting on the kitchen floor in rapt attention. When I finished that one, and Benjamin Bunny, they were getting cold but wanted another story, so I told them to get their duvets and come back. Eventually about 14 of the 19 girls were huddled together on the kitchen floor, so I used the opportunity to share my testimony, although did it in the third person – the story of “Maree”, and how Maree met the Lord, and later met Ronald, and so on. They thought it was a great story. Eventually I unveiled the fact that I knew so much about Maree because it was me, and they were so excited! And when Maree and Ronald came to the island, they were really interested and excited. I guess it was quite novel for them to hear about a Westernized girl and her experiences, but it was also great for them to see God’s hand at work, and I hope it made an impression on them. We watched some DVD after that, and eventually at about midnight I started to get them settled. At about 12.30 I threatened to phone their parents to come and fetch them if they didn’t stop whispering and being a nuisance, because the rest of the girls were complaining that they couldn’t get to sleep.

After not very much sleep on a hard floor, we were awake at about 7 am. Then the Aunty Lynn, Aunty Lynn, Aunty Lynn started up again. We had instructed all the kids to bring their own breakfast, and we provided milk. However, I didn’t have 19 breakfast bowls – plus enough for the 15 boys that Nick had to deal with! So we just had to eat in shifts, and then I was washing bowls as they became available. Then I had to replenish the milk and sugar, find spoons, reprimand the girls in the bathroom for taking too long, find the string thingie that held a mattress together, stop the girls from going to the schoolroom in their pyjamas, get them to pack up their things, provide juice for them and then wash those cups again, stop them from drinking said juice in the lounge, stop them from eating chips in the house and making a mess, which they did anyway because they treated the Manse like a camp dormitory instead of someone’s actual house, wipe toothpaste off the bathroom door, find out why the bath was running (someone was scrubbing their teeth in the bath, using loads of unnecessary water), help them roll up their sleeping bags, etc. I ate my breakfast in the kitchen, getting in a mouthful whenever I could. It was hectic, and definitely too much for one person to handle. Nick had the same scenario on his side, although perhaps a bit worse, because the boys couldn’t even pour their cereal into their bowls, never mind the milk part!! By 10 am the kids had all managed to get their stuff moved into the church, to be ready for collection after GNC. You can imagine that we had a good number of kids at GNC! Quite a relief to bid farewell to the kids (or at least those who bothered to even say goodbye or thank-you) and have a quiet moment, before we had to tackle the enormous job of the clean-up.