Elisha and the Shunammite woman

We were really short on boys this week! So the Shunammite woman's husband was the only genuine male in our story.

We introduced Elisha & his servant and had them walk around the room a couple of times, stopping twice at the invitation of our heroine to sit down at the table with bowls & chopsticks and "eat a meal" with her & her husband. After they left the second time, the woman suggests preparing a room for them, and they do that together: they unfolded a cot in a corner of the room and added a table, chair and candlestick.

The next time Elisha came around they were invited to relax in the room. Our Elisha was NOT going to lie down on the bed; at least she was eventually willing to sit on the edge of it, while Gehazi sat on the stool. They conferred about what to do to thank the woman & eventually tell her she's going to have a son. (Actually we had to just say, they told her. Elisha was instructed to tell our 11-year-old Shunammite woman she was going to have a son. She stared at her for a few beats and whispered, "she's so young!") Anyway, she is told the prophecy and says, don't trick me, please.

Sure enough, she has a son. I forgot to bring the baby doll from home; so I grabbed an old craft off a shelf; one of these dolls we'd made out of water bottles and Styrofoam balls. Mom was trying to cuddle her baby when its head fell off—oops! (Must be why the child ended up with the murderous headache in the next scene, right?)

We chose one of our not-usually-overly cooperative girls to be the child and she did well, though she wanted mom to stick with her. Worked well; we had mom be one of the other reapers when the child complained of the headache—the one who brought the child home. Decided on the spot to skip the interlude with the child sitting on mom's lap until he dies & put him/her straight to bed. Fortunately she was willing to lie down, and even to be covered with a sheet when she "died."

Mom then gets on her donkey and trots off to find Elisha and says, didn't I tell you not to trick me?! Gehazi gets back to the house first, feels the child and says, yup, he's dead. Then Elisha comes and no way are we going to try to get him/her to lie prone on top of the child! But she knelt willingly by the side of the bed with both hands on the child. Then the child was supposed to sneeze seven times. She tried really hard but couldn't figure out how to imitate a sneeze. So we got seven little coughs, after which she got up and Elisha took her to the mother, with the conclusion: God doesn't trick people.

For game time, we attached a little "room" (tissue box) to a corner of a table and said how if Elisha wanted to rest, he just needed to get to that little room, so we would try to get to that little room too—with one of those little cars that you pull back a few inches and they go forward. Not always in a straight line, of course. A little bit too easy to be a really good game, but our kids are so uncritical, they like just about anything!

For our craft we made candlesticks like the one they put in Elisha's room.

The candles were white TP rolls—candles are supposed to be wax, of course, so we made them wax by coloring them with wax crayons. Most of the kids had a little trouble waiting long enough for the glue to dry on the handles, but they kept trying. I was proud of them all!