Day 274: 12 hrs of pure fun!

In Abishai's words, "Oh wow, wowie, wow, woah, wowie!!!"  What a day!  A day full of laughter and memories.  A day we haven't had in a long time.  And speaking of long, it was LOOOOOONGGGGG!!!!!  But we made it home, finally, in one piece!

Where to begin? At the beginning of course!  6am was our wake up time this morning, but we were up and go everyone where they needed to be to start the Bible Bowl competition at 9am.

The shirts say, "Pharoah said, 'No way!' but God said, "Yahweh."  Clever isn't it?  Some of the kids designed it since they are studying and basically memorizing word for word the book of Exodus plus some from Deuteronomy this year.

This guys did very well today both with leadership skills and good attitudes.  Justin did not get upset, although he looked bored at some points.  He did well when it was his turn to play captain and even buzzed in once and got the answer correctly!  For his first every Bible Bowl event, he did great!  Benaiah did Beginner Bowl for a few years before we moved, but he seemed much more engaged and competitive today.  And their other teammates also spoke up and buzzed in and had fun!

We had one of the best coaches a team could have, Miss Jess Henry, who grew up doing Bible Bowl her whole life (her whole family leads and participate in it).  She was kind and gave them all pointers along the way and kept things fair as far as who was going to be captain and who was going to sit out (we had one extra player on our team).

I won't try to explain the rules, but Bible Bowl is like a very complicated game of trivia of the Bible passages and if you don't say it exactly correctly, then you are wrong.  At one point, one of the guys said, "Dead fish" (what was in the Nile River God turned it into blood) when he couldn't come up with the real answer.  He wasn't wrong if you were paraphrasing, but he was wrong in the eyes of the Bible Bowl quizmaster.

The rules can be tough, and the competitin even tougher, but no one got in trouble for laughing for not knowing the wrong answer.  We had a very relaxed atmosphere today.  And I don't know why Benaiah has to give me the "derp" face and Justin covered his.  Goofballs.  They play 10 rounds against other teams and also take a written test.  Justin scored just a bit higher than Benaiah on the written exam.  It was the first time that Justin had filled in a scantron/bubble test.  They got around 55% but to put that into perspective, there were 10 or more people with perfect scores!  We are in the bottom bracket, but that's ok.

 Bible Bowl ended around 2:30pm so we drove up to Benaiah's school where the craft fair was going on.  We talked a bit and wandered around, but things were winding down, so we decided to leave.  Except that Jared had plugged his phone into the car, while he took a power nap and had the car on auxiliary power.  Well, that was a mistake.  We had switched cars with Leah so she could take Abishai and Keturah to church tonight and not have to switch carseats in and out.  Earlier this week, Leah had had trouble with her car, but thought it was just the battery.  Well, it wasn't just the battery.  We tried to charge it using a friend's car, but it wouldn't take a charge.  We had roadside assistance come out and they said that 99% of the time their charger can fix the problem within a few minutes.  That was a no go, too.  Then a friend of a friend came and really confirmed that it was not the battery but something to do with the electrical engineering.  And finally we got a tow truck to come and tow it to the dealership to be fixed. All of this took 4 hrs!!!!

Hm, let's learn how to jumpstart a car, shall we?

1 hr later when we thought it might rain.  Jared had the windows down and since everything is electrical, we couldn't raise them.  So, before they closed the school down, Benaiah grabbed a roll of plastic bags.  Leah now has a well decorated car.

Jared trying to sort it all out.  Thankfully, he has these pocket chargers he can use to charge our phones.  Otherwise, we would have run out of cell phone power to make all these long phone calls!  You see, Gary and Leah were both at church!  Leah came about halfway through the ordeal and Gary came at the very end because he was preaching.

Meanwhile, what is a family to do but play on the school's playground!  Benaiah started it when he announced, "I think I'm going to go swing!" Yes, a 2 year old in a man's body.  Most definitely.  So many giggles poking each other and running around.

Monkey man!

Yes, he's on a slide that he's too big for!  With his wireless headset and iPod running.

When Grandma came with Abishai, (Keturah was still in Sunday School, so Grandpa brought her later), we urged Abishai to play at the park, too, but that didn't hold his attention.  Instead, he just kept staring out at the very, very, very busy state highway in front of the school and saying his car sounds.  Jared remarked, "If Abishai could look out at a picture window for 12 hrs a day like Socks (our dog) did in Charlottetown, he would."  That kid loves his cars!

Yes, that's American Flag duct tape we used to gently attach the bags to the car without ruining the paint.  Well, at least it won't get wet!

We were all getting stir crazy, so we started doing stupid stuff.  Well, the boys mostly did.  Like climbing in the back of the car to see if they would fit.  They also climbed all over the car bumper things at the end of the parking spaces to see who could run across them the fastest (Jared was the most nimble of them all!)  Benaiah accidentally kicked over a cement block and it broke.  The boys got to witness some PDA between Mom and Dad, lol.  I showed the boys a CW/DC trailer thing.

It's a huge trunk!

Yes, all 3 are in there!  With Justin at the way back!

"This is so comfty!" they said!

No joke, 15 minutes later, they have made pillows out of the shopping bags and are playing video games, all while still in Grandma's trunk!  At least she keeps it empty!

And then I was sitting at a distance from the car and up pops this huge head from the back of the car.  Benaiah had a hard time getting his man sized body out of the trunk!  I'm cracking up laughing just looking at this picture!  I was in such a giggle fit by this time that anything and everything was making me laugh.  It definitely beats fighting with the man child any day!

When the tow truck finally came (not his fault!) Abishai got to see it up close!  He was doing his whole "wow oh wowie wow wow woah" sounds, especially when we let him tough the tail light.  It's not everyday that a little boy his size gets to watch a real truck in action.  It's kind of like watching your hero.

Meanwhile, at Grandma's, Abishai and Keturah played outside, had lunch, had some naptime/screentime and went to church. 

I'm very grateful Jared and I got to spend the whole day together with the two oldest.  It really is a miracle that we got through a whole day with no fights and tons of laughter.  This year has been such a tough one and these kind of precious days are very healing.  Yeah we were stuck for a few hours. But we were safe, dry, warm enough, and only slightly hungry/thirsty because at least we had eaten lunch today.  So many people can't say that.  What a great day!