Youth Lock - In!!!

Sunday night was the youth lock-in at church. After we had a special service to celebrate our pastor's 20 year anniversary as pastor, we headed over to the youth building. Once all 72 teenagers were signed in and divided into teams, we were on our way for the photo scavenger hunt. I had a great team of 7 kids. We were given a list of about 200 random and crazy things we were to get a picture of. Our first stop was our house!! Here are SOME of the pictures we took. This is Lauren and Stephanie, two of the senior girls.



A shampoo Mohawk!

Hand in the cookie jar....

someone falling down the stairs....

Cutting a teammate's hair

The entire team under a bed!!

Fluffy Bunny!

Tin foil hats

Teammate with tin foil in mouth!

Bologna mask!

Antiquing a teammate ( a handful of flour in the face)

Teammate jumping into a pool fully clothed!!! It was FREEZING COLD outside and Aaron jumped into the pool!! The good thing was he just ran across the yard and jumped into a hot shower and put dry clothes on!

Team doing the "duckwalk" across the street. Notice the heavy fog!!

Elvis impersonator

Team on a fence

Team in a tree house

Team in a jacuzzi

Team in pillow fight

Teammate "thrown" into a bush

After we finished all that our house, we headed into town to get some more pictures at my friend, Stephanie's house.

Doing the "YMCA" in front of the YMCA

Eggs and bacon smiley face!

Team playing dead with pennies over their eyes.

A 10 person, 4 level human pyramid.

A "bright" idea

Teammate duct taped to the wall

An ice cube igloo

Drinking from a coffee pot.

We took more pictures....those are just a few of the best ones. After our 2 hour time limit was up, we all went back to the church to hang out for the rest of the night. We all put our pictures from our cameras and made a slide show with ALL the pictures. The kids played man hunt, watched movies, ate, hung out and just had a lot of fun until 8am in the morning!!

Hanging out in the gym.....

and in the hall........

and up in the "loft" . The loft is the upstair in the youth building that is all set up with for the youth to just have a hang out spot.

Playing Guitar Hero 4

Just hanging out around 5am.

It was a lot of fun but by 8am, I think everyone was ready to go home and go to sleep!!! Oh I almost forgot!!! OUR TEAM WON THE SCAVENGER HUNT!!! We ended up with 412 points!!!

Happy Birthday Aaron!!!!

Wednesday, Jan. 14Th, was Aaron's 15Th birthday. The years have just flown by and I can't believe my first baby has grown into a wonderful young man!!! It seems he should be toddling around under my feet still.....not towering above me!! Aaron is a great teenager and really makes our job as his parents easy. I am so very proud of what he has become and I can't wait to see what is yet to come.
To start his day off in a special way, Kristen, Morgan and Ian got up early and made pancakes for Aaron's breakfast in bed.

They tiptoed upstairs with breakfast in hand...complete with a candle!! Here they are about to go into Aaron's room.

WAKE UP BROTHER!!! They flipped the light on and sang Happy Birthday to wake him up.

AAHHHHHH....he was trying to open his eyes in the bright light!

After he blew out his candle, they set the plate down and then they all attacked him!

Happy Birthday to the BEST big brother in the whole world!! (even if he was having a hard time keeping his eyes open)

After breakfast, we got the books out to do a bit of school work for the day. Everyone worked hard and was finished by noon. Here is Kristen working on her history lesson.

Momo started working on a new pocket book called Healthy Me, Happy Me.

Ian worked on some pages in his workbook.

Here is Aaron doing some reading......can you guess what he was reading? The driver's test book of course!!!

Here is Grandpa after he had his coffee and breakfast.

Aaron did his favorite thing for his birthday....he played music!! The band was playing for the youth group at church that night. Some of his friends also surprised him with a pie in the face and silly string before he played!!! After church, he went out to eat with a group. That is a weekly activity they do after Wed. night church.

Once he finally made it home, we had a cake for him. Kristen had made the cake before church. We were out of candles so he only had one to blow out.

Here he is!!! The birthday boy getting a big hug from his little sister who absolutely adores her big brother. His hair is not wet in the picture....it is just a big sticky mess from the pie he encountered earlier that night!!

Thursday was just a quiet school day at home. Morgan made a neat diorama for her LLATL lesson. Here she is working on that.

Ian just being cute!

I also babysat Kayden again. Look at these gorgeous blue eyes!!

Momo with her finished diorama.

Aaron did some more in his art lesson book. These are "scribble figures". He was to make several figures using a small scribble motion but the trick was he couldn't pick his pencil up off the paper until it was complete.

I think this drawing is really neat. He had to fill in each area with a different pattern. He used instructions from a drawing book for the sea creature and then colored it in with the patterns.

Here is Momo typing her first post in her new blog!! She is loving having her own blog. Thank you to everyone who has been by and left comments on all of the kids blogs. They really love it!