Cain and Abel, round 2

One thing I forgot to do this week was to tape some cardboard over the on-demand water heater in the bathroom. One of our boys is big-time into tearing off electrical switches, and he tried a couple of times last Sunday to wrench the temperature gauge off. When I heard his grandmother scream, I thought she'd been injured! But absolutely no harm done. I will cover this up tomorrow morning before anyone gets there. Even if he remembers & wants to get at the switch, this will slow him down a little. I hope!

We had nine kids, which is exciting! But one drawback is that we can't necessarily come up with parts for everyone in the Bible story, so then some of the kids get bored. Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, God…still leaves out 4 kids.

Oh well, this coming Sunday we'll need EVERYONE for Noah's Ark!

We played balloon volleyball for our game. Said that normally volleyball is competitive; you want to "smash" the other team (like Cain smashed Abel). But just as Cain should have been able to cooperate with his brother instead of seeing worship as a competitive sport, we would play cooperatively and see how long we could keep the balloon going.

Even this game, in our small space, left some of the kids out when they got too far back. One neurotypical girl was especially unhappy. But we have two now and they are both the same age! They enjoyed goofing around together during the free play time. Thank You, Lord.

For the craft we did the same as three years ago; pasting cotton balls on sheep drawings to represent the good fat sheep Abel offered to the Lord. One of the moms remembered that once we pasted cotton balls on jars to make 3-D sheep. Yes, and we'll probably do that again too, but we'd start with this easier one.

I'm starting to get each week's story, game and craft instructions written up in Chinese characters, with illustrations where necessary, to eventually print up and have on CD for people to use when we've moved on. It's hard work! The stories at least are written phonetically already and "translating" them is not too big a job. But I never wrote up the game or craft instructions, either just did them myself or showed them to someone else to lead. This calls for much more complicated Chinese than I'm used to composing—yikes! (I don't think I would have managed to blog this week without the extra time provided by two public holidays (China National Day and the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival)