All those babies!

I'm afraid I didn't do the best possible job of writing the story for last Sunday. I thought it was so simple that whoever led it would yawn all the way through it. Wrong. Jacob goes to Paddan-Aram, and sees Rachel at the well. I had "embellished" the story to point out that Abraham's servant had asked God to let whoever gave him and his camels a drink be the chosen wife for Isaac. But that Jacob didn't require such a high standard—when he saw how beautiful Rachel was, he ran and gave her and her sheep a drink! It came out all garbled, though; the reader said emphasized that Jacob hadn't stopped and prayed like Abraham's servant. Implying that if he had, he wouldn't have made such a foolish choice. Not sure I agree with that!

We did have some fun with getting Jacob married off. First there was the agreement with Laban to work seven years for Rachel. We wrote up a "contract" for Laban and Jacob to sign. Then Rachel insisted that she wanted to sign too. Sure, why not—women's lib lives! (smile) After "seven years," though, we had Laban shush everyone while he put this veil on not Rachel but Leah, and married her off to Jacob.

Finally he did get to marry Rachel as well (I meant to write in that wedding, oops—I thought it would be fun to have Jacob peek under the veil and see if it was really her). Then they started having all those babies. The reader just had to say the names, and introduce the various "surrogate mothers" as they got roped in. I had all the "babies" already prepared (paper towel rolls with faces and name labels) & handed them to the proper mothers to hang onto until the final count. So why was it so hard? I guess the reader just had a hard time keeping track of where she was with all these gobbled-gooky names (which don't sound at all like proper Chinese names). Sigh.

For game time we had the "Leah" team and the "other" team line up and, in relay fashion, run up and take one of "their" children out of the basket at the front of the room. The idea was supposed to be to see which team finished the fastest & then double-check if they had all their babies right (the teams were each given a list of names). I forgot about the little problem that if one team chose a wrong baby or two, then the faster/smarter team still couldn't "win". I suppose ideally I should have had two separate sets for them to have to sort through, but I didn't have enough extra towel rolls!!

At least the craft was popular. We made our own little "babies" out of pipe cleaners and some wooden beads that I was able to buy in Hong Kong while we were on vacation (good timing)! Though I think these could also be done nicely using colored drinking straws, cut up, instead of the hard-to-find beads.

We've lost a couple of our former attenders for various reasons, and have added another neurotypical 7-year-old whose mother wanted to come & volunteer with us. So it is getting a little harder to plan the games so that they are fair for the autistic kids yet not too blah for the "smart" kids. It would be great if we could do something special with the three neurotypical girls during the free time, but the logistics need some more prayer first. They like the free play time, of course. Plus we haven't got an excess of volunteers. Nor do I feel ready to take on preparing a parallel curriculum, however abbreviated. Like I said, needs more prayer.