A Week With Emily

As I mentioned in Monday's post, this week our church was hosting VBS. I volunteered to run the "snack shack" for the week. With that big job in view, I took the week off of work (so glad I did that) to spend the week in ministry. I also invited my niece, Emily, to stay with us for the week (glad I did that too). It was a good week and a busy week. Emily was a great help with the snack shack preparations. I took pictures of our week together, and I'll share them in this post.

Monday's snack was pyramid-shaped sandwiches. First the proper sanitary precautions needed to be taken. (She wasn't too thrilled about the shower cap, but she was good a sport nonetheless, even let me take a picture of her).

Emily put the filling in all of our sandwiches, and I buttered them for the grilling process to come later that evening. (We had grilled cheese, chocolate and marshmallow, and peanut butter & jelly sandwiches that evening).

The next night we made desert dessert cups (vanilla pudding mixed with whipped cream, topped with vanilla cookie crumbs and decorated with a couple gummy worms hanging off the side of the cups). Emily had a little fun with the gummy worms, as you can see in the picture.

At the end of the VBS session on Tuesday night, the kids were instructed to come the next evening dressed as an Egyptian, as there would be a costume contest. That was a curve ball I wasn't expecting. Wednesday morning we spent some time making an Egyptian costume. (I'll write a separate post on the making of the costume).

Recently Greg dug out a small air hockey table given to him and his brother as a gift several Christmases ago. We played many games of air hockey throughout the week. Emily loved the game and improved greatly as the week went on. She said she needed to play me first because I am level 1 and then Greg because he is level 2 (I thought the comment was slightly insulting.....but not entirely untrue). Emily is a bit of a trash talker when she plays the air hockey. I was the recipient of comments such as: "Come on, you're playing like a girl." and "Oh, it's on now!" several times throughout the week. When Greg and I played against each other, Emily would provide play by play commentary and commercials. It was quite entertaining.

On our last day together, Emily and I went to Bunker Beach (a local water park attraction complete with wave pool, waterslides, sand play park, and a lazy river---Minnesotans are good at the summer thing---we have so little of the warm weather, so we live it up for three months--lots of fun summer attractions in Minnesota). We had a great time. We spent a lot of time in the wave pool--got a little too much sun--went down a few water slides.

At the end of the closing program tonight, Emily went home with her mom (so great to have her mom at the program). It was a fun week spent in ministry at our church and ministry with my niece. I'm grateful God allowed it.