Heavenly Homemakers

Phew! This weekend has been incredibly fun and exhausting. I was too busy to take pictures so I will instead give you a bullet point run-down of our past four days:

• Friday evening, 140 teens and sponsors arrived at our church building for a weekend youth rally. Matt was home working frantically to at least get our new shower in place since we were housing boys all weekend. I stayed at the building and helped organize housing for all the people. THAT is a job.
• 17 teenage boys came home with us to “sleep.” They found our drum set.
• We fed the boys snacks, even though they had just eaten at the building.
• I accidentally said words out loud about the smell of the feet. All of the boys blamed all of the other boys.
• Matt stayed up until 4:30 in the morning trying to understand instructions about installing a shower that read something like, “Put the white thing with the other white thing, then slide it onto the round piece.” There were a lot of white things and different sized round pieces. God bless him. He got it up and running.
• I slept from about midnight to 1:30, then could not go back to sleep until 5. What in the world???
• We delivered the boys back to the church building at 8:30 (it took three trips to get them there). We dropped Malachi off at a friend’s house, then Matt and I headed to the rally to teach classes.
• Matt and I enjoyed teaching four sets of teens throughout the day – Matt with mixed classes and me with roomfuls of girls! It was wonderful and fun. What great youth!
• We finally got back to pick up Malachi at 8:00 pm. He was thrilled that he had been able to play with his friend for “over 10 hours, Mom!”
• We made three trips to get all the boys back to our house.
• We fed the boys snacks, even though they had just eaten at the building.
• Somehow after the full day and lack of sleep, the boys still didn’t want to sleep. They have so much fun together and have limited time together throughout the year so it would seem that sleeping would waste their precious together time.
• We woke up to snow. Lots and lots of snow.
• Matt has a snow removal business. He bundled up and headed out for what would be a very long day.
• We called for help and got all the kids to the building for brunch and worship.
• It became very clear that no one could drive home as had been the plan. Several other moms and I worked frantically to pull out leftovers to warm up to feed everyone. After church, we had a huge spread of random but tasty items for the kids to eat while we visited with sponsors about driving conditions.
• 110 of the youth and sponsors needed to stay an extra night. The kids were thrilled with the extra together time and the fact that they would miss a day of school on Monday. Phone calls were made, youth leaders talked to all the parents.
• Housing arrangements were made yet again for all the youth. We shuffled them around so that entire youth groups could be together, making it easier on the sponsors/drivers to get up and go on Monday.
• We needed more food! And a Super Bowl Party! What to do, what to do? Adults made plans. Kids hung out, fell asleep on church pews, headed across the street to play in the college gym, or played board games. They were loving life.
• A man from church with “connections” came to the building with the hugest TV I’ve ever seen. He set it up in the fellowship hall, and fixed it up to stream the game that night.
• Several adults headed to the store and came back with 48 frozen pizzas, a ton of popcorn, and stuff to make 14 batches of party mix. We got busy in the kitchen.
• We had a fabulous party, the kids loved it, they were very gracious and seriously – I think this turned out to be the kids’ favorite day of the entire rally.
• Matt had been moving snow all day (that continued to fall and blow). I texted him to let him know that we’d be having 12 extras that night and to please put sheets in the washer when he went home. (I hadn’t been able to stop and go home all day.)

Let’s pause now so that I can tell you that Matt called around 6:30 to tell me that:

Our washer had busted. We could do no laundry.

I giggled because I was loopy, exhausted, and giggling sounded like the best response. As I hung up the phone, I looked straight ahead of me and realized there was a washer and dryer right in the kitchen I’d been working in all day. I called him back. He brought the sheets to the building. We washed them while we worked. Perfect.

• At 10:00 we made it back to our house with the 12 extra people.
• You guessed it, we fed them snacks, even though they had just eaten at the building.
• We had a great time getting to know our new guests (a few girls and a mom this time, yay me!).
• We went to bed at a more reasonable hour, like 12:30. It was bliss.
• I made a big breakfast before sending everyone on the road this morning around 10:00. I was so thankful for bags of muffin batter in the freezer!
• We declared the day to be a “snow day” even though as home schoolers, we never take snow days. Most of us stayed in our pj’s all day. Bliss.
• Matt picked up the piece we needed to fix the washer and had it ready for me by early afternoon. Then he went out to do more snow removal. Love him.
• The afternoon and evening has been spent making broth and soup (perfect for a cold day like today!), doing laundry, and reading quietly. I took a really long nap and woke up as a new woman.
• OH! And our internet has been out since last night and none of us had the energy to do anything about it until this afternoon. It was a wireless router issue, and at this point, everything is working except for my work computer. Oh well. :)  We’ll get it figured out when our brains work again.

So there you have it. It was truly a wonderful weekend. We love these kids!!! I’m pretty sure they will remember this youth rally for a very long time – hopefully the spiritual parts too. :)

What did you do this weekend, and what are you thankful for? You must leave a comment to share! (I’ve missed hanging out here the past few days.)