Saturday, February 17, 2007

4-H Lock in

I returned from the annual lock-in about 10:30am this morning and am still brain dead. Remember when staying up all night was fun? It's not any more.

The kids all had a ball. We had forty kids in attenance this year, which was up a bit from last, and nine adults, which was amost too many until this morning when it was time to clean up and that was just about right.

One of the leaders who was there is a foster mom and she brought her three fairly new foster daughters along for the ride--all three of them teenagers. Two of them were up for adoption and this particular set of foster parents just aren't interested in adopting. I have to tell you, if we had another room and weren't suffering from a substantial financial drought(the worst in years), I wouldn't hesitate to add them to our family. I want a daughter rather badly and have been a big fan of adoption since I was old enough to understand the concept. Those two girls have had a horrible time--things like that just shouldn't happen to kids. And to be a teenager in the system can be a huge dead end. Nobody wants them and for the most part, even foster parents prefer smaller children. So teens often wind up shuffled around more than the others. I told my husband about it when I came in this morning and had a tough time talking to him about it without getting teary. We have a long history of arguments about this subject and I've given up talking him into it.

Both my evening programs fell through. My oldest came home early on Friday with the stinkin' flu (accept no imitations, no faking, influenza) and he couldn't play which meant their band couldn't perform. The guy who was supposed to do the drug dog demonstration didn't show up so the evening threatened to be pretty unstructured. But the teen council really stepped up to bat with games and activities and movies and the kids responded.

Most of my boys are asleep now. Sam, the eight year old, stayed up all night, beating both of the brothers who came. He was very proud of that until we got home this morning and then he sort of fell apart. He's been asleep since about eleven.

I am very, very glad that event is over.

I got up early yesterday morning and edited several pages in Troubled Waters. Editing is actually kind of fun this time because I left a lot fewer questions than before. I don't think today would be a good time to edit, but I think I'll play hooky from church tomorrow and get some more stuff done.

2 comments:

Andrew McAllister said...

Hi Mary,

Thank you for your Valentine's Day story. I liked it so much that I featured it in my follow-up post this week.

Mary O. Paddock said...

Thank you Andrew. I'm glad you liked it.