Still not much likelihood of blogging about Kessingland, as the weekend has been desperately busy. After more than 6 years of training (including two extensions and three children) I finally completed my local preacher training a few months ago and this Sunday was my recognition/commissioning/admission (whatever you like to call it!) service. Knowing that this was planned, it foolishly did not occur to me when giving available dates for this quarter’s plan, to block the date for preaching – I thought the fact that I was to be involved in a service int eh afternoon would be enough to invoke the “at least two weeks between services” rule. How wrong can you be? Finding myself with a service to take in the morning (not at our home church) and family (beyond Bob and children) apparently uninterested anyway, the plans I had secretly nourished of arranging a big celebration quietly died 🙁
Instead we spent Saturday at a baby shower in Horsham (thrown by a good friend from Hunnybeez) which gave us the chance to meet up with lots of “imaginary friends” and eat lots of cake 🙂
Oh and before we left I failed (once again) to find my hairbrush, which L has a habit of stealing and hiding, and decided that I really was fed up with long hair which is so fine and flyaway, but also thick, that I cannot get an ordinary brush through it (only an expensive specialist one, which I cannot justify replacing when DD loses it) and which is so long that I cannot reach to brush the ends in the same stroke as the top, which will not hold any style but straight, takes half an hour to wash and half a day to dry etc etc – you get the idea 😆 Soooo instead of finding the hairbrush I found the hairdressing scissors I use on J and K and I hacked it all off to jaw length – saved me brushing it, anyway 😉 Then of course no one recognised me at the meet!
Having got back from Horsham some time after 10pm we were all a bit tired and frazzled to start with today, but hey ho! The church crawl started at 10am, when we left for Sturton Street Methodist Church (calming the storm – Bob as Jesus, water squirters and poster board to make storm effects, children’s song with actions even though we had brought the only children there and DS1 had opted out and was doing Pop-a-beads at the back of the church 😕 and origami boats as part of the sermon 😆 )
Church crawl part 2 was the Bouncearound summer party at St Andrew the Great in the city centre, where we enjoyed delicious food (especially the puddings :lick: ) and the children were able to do a variety of activities from bouncing on an inflatable castle to having faces (K = pirate and L = butterfly) and nails (J = glittery orange) painted. Then L snuggled up in Leo on Bob’s chest and we marched off to church number 3, our home church, for “Mummy’s special service”.
In moving from church 1 to 2, J and I had taken the opportunity to nip into the Oxfam shop for something to distract the littles during afternoon service – and found that they were selling off last season’s toys for £1, so spent a judicious £10 and got enough to entertain chillies and restock presents box 😀 K and J accordingly spent most of the service looking at their new goodies, J making spiders (Scary Science pack), K doing numbers and alphabet beginners packs and both using a magnetic theatre set. L, having fallen asleep en route, very considerately slept until the round of applause as I sat back down having been welcomed into my new role as fully accredited local preacher and then snuggled up for a feed until the end of the service 🙂
After the service we were plied with yet more cake (note to self: feed children on bread, water and plain vegetables for next week 😆 ) and then came home to watch the Queen’s birthday bash on tv until we could decently hustle the boys off to bed. L is still up, thanks to an unusually long sleep this afternoon – but for once we’re not complaining!
Must get back to some kind of normality next week!
