Where A Kid Can Be A Kid

As I've said before, I firmly believe that the holiday season begins in September with my birthday. However, the rest of the world seems to disagree, and is just starting to catch up to me. Now, there can be a general consensus that the holiday season has officially begun!!! Let's all take a second to give a great big cheer!!!! But wait!! There's no time for that- it's the holiday season, so now we have a million things to do!

Luckily for me, this week's million things were mostly focused on kids, which is always fun (and anyone who disagrees can go be a Scrooge elsewhere)! It began with my usual Wednesday night in Mission Friends. My husband's aunt and I are the leaders for the group, and she always has THE most creative, fun ideas for things for the kids to do. This week, due to the up-coming Thanksgiving holiday, she brought in an activity where the kids made little turkeys. Each feather on the turkeys lists a different thing each child is thankful for, and they turned out so cute!!

After this fun day, I got to spend time with kids again over the weekend, when my cousin Libby turned 2! We all went to Chuck E. Cheese's to celebrate, and it was just a great time. Libby in particular seemed to have a ball. She played the games,

played with her cousins,

rode the rides,

and opened about a hundred presents.

She and the other kids had a great time! And then, so did the big kids. Here's one of my sisters at the bottom of the slide- you know, the one you slide down to get out of the play structure. She, along with another of our sisters, and several cousins (all over the age of 14 by the way) all went in to play. (Side note, the picture is blurry because she was in the process of being run over by an unrelated child coming down the slide.)

It really was a lot of fun to watch them all having so much fun, especially Libby celebrating her birthday!

Then last night, we went to church for the annual Thanksgiving dinner, after which we spent time working with the shoe boxes for Operation Christmas Child. Now, I know I've mentioned this before, but in case you don't know what that is, I talk about it here, or you can get more information about it here. Basically, it's a really great way of helping out children in need at Christmastime with basic necessities as well as toys. Even though I don't think anymore churches are collecting boxes, you can still send in money to help, as it costs $7 per box to ship them. Anyway, after dinner, we all pitched in to load the boxes into the cars of the volunteers who are taking them to Charlotte, N.C. in a couple weeks. As we loaded them into the vehicles (and yes, that's plural- we had so many that they wouldn't all fit in one!) we had them counted, and we wound up with almost 400 boxes! That's about 400 children who will get much-needed items and a happy holiday, which is just so exciting!! Here's one of the SUVs filled to bursting with the boxes!

It was an incredibly joy-filled week, with so much time spent with children, or working to help children, and I had a really great time. And then, my weekend was ended even more joyously- one of my friends is expecting!!!! Now, I won't give names because she and her husband are waiting to tell most people, but I'm too excited!!! I had such a wonderful, blessed week spending time with kids, and now there is another kid who will soon be in the world!!

God is good!!!!!!!