A Snake in the Garden

This Sunday's lesson was on the fall of man. We used Barbie dolls again, because it's an important part of the story that they were naked, and there's only so far you want to go in role play! But rather than manipulating the dolls myself like I did a year ago, we had volunteers doing that. (Adam did a lot of pacing around the garden! smile) When they were supposed to eat the fruit, the volunteers ate it.

When we did this three years ago, we only had three kids that Sunday, which worked extremely well for craft time. Each one strung a bunch of fabric leaves which then became Adam's one-piece and Eve's two-piece cover-ups. This time we had six kids. Instead of just stringing the leaves together, I had them sew them to a ribbon, so that the fabric leaves (did I do a lot of cutting last week!!) would end up side-by-side instead of face-to-face. My idea was to tie the ends of the ribbon together and wrap them sort of sari-style. It didn't work super well. I'd welcome any suggestions if someone out there is more craft-wise than I am.

Our game, called "the path of sin" consisted of throwing our large foam die and taking the corresponding amount of steps on the rubber alphabet tiles laid out in line. At intervals there were different tiles (with the alphabet letters missing) & these were "sin" tiles. The idea being, life would be just dandy without sin, but if you land on one of those you have to go back to square one. One of our boys threw a number which would land him on one of these tiles. With a mischievous grin on his face, he picked up the die and made another throw—same number—and another. One of the other moms started scolding him for not playing according to the rules. I didn't want to discourage him, though. I thought he was showing great initiative, and not being crabby about "losing" but having fun with trying to get around the game. Hey, he just doesn't want to sin, I said! I can't remember now whether he ended up starting over or not. But he didn't lose his temper, that I do know, which for this boy is true progress.

In the afternoon Bruce & I went to a concert of the Macau Youth Orchestra. One of our newest kids, 10-year-old Ming Yan, was playing violin. (She's neurotypical, her 11-year-old sister is not). We enjoyed that very much. They were very good.

During this past week we had two birthdays in our core group happen to fall on the same day—Mrs. Lei's according to the Chinese calendar, and Chu Wing Tung's (my profile buddy) according to the modern calendar. So we invited both families out to dinner all together. It was really nice to get together without any core group business to think about, just enjoying each other's company. It would be nice to do more of this kind of thing.