Not Suited To Be A Super Spy

This past weekend out church youth participated in Disciple Now (D.Now) weekend. The premise is that the students attend a conference together on Friday evening and most of Saturday and spend Friday and Saturday nights separated by gender and grade in church families' home. The idea is to draw them closer to Jesus (the conference) and closer to each other (the home time). Prior to having Philip, Matthew and I had been a "host home" for several years, but this year Matthew manned our fort (i.e. stayed home with Philip and Braewyn) while I helped out at the 11th grade girls' home (these are the girls I teach in Sunday School).

Friday evening after having supper at my house, I was getting ready to meet Kim (host home "mom") and Kristie (other adult helper) at Walmart. The three of us have been friends for about five years. As I was leaving my house, Philip was asking Matthew if he could watch the rest of "The Backyardigans' International Super Spy" movie. I didn't know then how my weekend would turn into that movie.

Well, there weren't enough tickets for adults to attend the conference so we served as shuttle bus operators between Kim and Bobby's house (they got married last November and are still newlyweds!) and the conference host-church. The girls didn't say much about the conference, but we stayed up chatting about random things until 1:30am Friday night. Ah, lights out as we would have an early start on Saturday.

Saturday started at 6:00am for me as we made breakfast, got the girls to the conference at 8:45am, and I headed home to take Philip to a "Breakfast Birthday Party" at McDonald's for a friend from MOPS. Next to the grocery store, back home, shower, back to Kim's, made desserts and cut tomatoes and lettuce for our 11th/12th grade cook-out that night. Oh well, suddenly no cook-out as the severe thunderstorms all afternoon left the barn we were to use unusable. Everyone met at a location to swap cook-out ingredients and take portions back to their own homes. Matthew brought the kids over to enjoy dinner with us.

Now comes the super spy part...

Last year, Kim's house was visited late Saturday night by one of the guys' groups who "decorated" her front yard. They hinted that they would be returning this year so Kim was on high-alert. She didn't want them to arrive and us be unprepared as this was her new house. (When they married, she moved into Bobby's house on the farm! His parents own a lot of land surrounding their house and cows literally roam all around it.) We strategized for a few hours after Matthew took the kids back to our house (around 9:00pm).

(Before I get into the details, let me say that I really don't think this stuff should be involved in a D.Now weekend, and will hopefully be more tightly restricted in years to come. With that said, my strict mommy attitude melted into girls' slumber party mode as the hours passed and staying up past my bedtime brings out the silly side of me.)

Bobby had bought a camera to mount over the garage as their driveway is pretty long and it would enable them to see who was approaching (this would be for day-to-day use but just proved extra fun on this night). We also had positioned the garden hose to spray onto the driveway. Our cars were all turned with headlights facing the driveway. The plan was when the boys came down the driveway, douse them with the hose and hit our cars' panic buttons setting off the horns and headlights.

In the meantime (and in the gaps between groups arriving-I'll explain in a minute), we were sitting in the kitchen with all the lights off, watching the TV which Bobby had connected to the camera, crawling to windows trying to peek out the blinds to stare out into the pasture looking for black silhouettes. Yes, we turned on the hose and hit panic buttons several times. We came to find out on Sunday that three grades of boys had planned to deliver plastic Easter eggs to their front yard. They came in separate missions and that's why the multiple "defensive maneuvers". Each time however, we thought they were just outside the garage and so we hit the alarms. Turned out they were still half-way up the drive and would just run back to the street.

Overall, it was fun at the moment but now just seems like a really weird, bad dream. Matthew and I agreed that D.Now should be more Christ-focused and that includes going to bed at a decent hour so as to be alert during the conference on Saturday and church on Sunday. We do have great kids at our church, but things will just run a lot differently if we've involved next year.

Here are some pics from the weekend.


Here is their conference booklet.


The highlight of Kristie's weekend was petting the bull! She fed him some grass too.


Kim and Bobby, a.k.a. "Mr. Wonderful" as the girls call him.


Here are Brittany and Meredith being crazy girls.


Me getting ready on Saturday.

Braewyn's new favorite toy was Kim's ceramic, chicken centerpiece! From left, Bobby, Meredith, Brittany, Kristie, Braewyn, and Cassie. Lauren was our fourth girl, but she had to go to work at this time.

Philip was showing everyone how he carries Braewyn on his shoulders. Matthew looks like a ghost! He says this is the Brooks family totem pole.

The students asked Philip if they could curl his hair, but he said, "That's for girls!" Guess he said yes when they asked if they could gel his hair.


Here is our spy-vision TV. Yes, that's really what we looked at for 3 hours -- a lot of nothing.