The Edge: All Nighter

Okay so here is my update about the All-Nighter we had last week with the junior highs. It was very interesting to say the least. Here is how the whole night played out...

Kids started showing up super early...like 6:45 when it was supposed to start at 7. You know how people always say "We start at 10:00, so 10:15 church time"...well with youth, they're normally 15 minutes EARLY coz they just can't wait to get started! They all dumped their sleeping bags and pillows all over the sanctuary and started running around the building...getting all excited and more energetic with each person to show up. 13 kids in total ended up showing up; two of which I didn't know at all before that night. It was a bigger turn out by about 60% than I was expecting.

We started playing games around 7:30...lots of messy ones. We started off with "Banana Blowout" - which is your typical "stick a whole banana in your mouth, put pantyhose over your head and try to squirt the banana out through the pantyhose"...it was great.

Then we moved on to a not-so-messy game, but extremely competitive...it's called "Chocolate Bar Scramble", where the kids roll a dice and everytime they get a 1, they put on a pair of gloves and start unwrapping and eating a chocolate bar...until the next person gets a 1 and then steals it away. The point of the game is to eat as much chocolate as you possibly can before it's gone.

Then we put down plastic bags, a pound of soft butter and an entire box of Sultana Bran (Raisin Bran...kinda) and told the kids they had 2 minutes to smear butter on their face and get as much cereal on them without using their hands. It was hilarious!

Then some kids kept the butter on their faces to play Bobbing for Marshmallows...in a bowl of flour! So they were getting flour stuck to their faces and huge gobs of it in their mouths.

The last game was getting back at Katrina and I, who were the leaders for the night. We played Banana Split Drop, where Kat and I laid on the ground and the kids stood on chairs, dropping Banana Split ingredients into our mouths...including the whipped cream in the spray can. Wow.

From there, we had a Tony Hawk tournament on PlayStation 2, while some of the kids watched a movie. Then we all watched a movie together when the champion was crowned. Then we had a SingStar time, where some people watched a movie, but the rest of us went back to the PlayStation to sing bad karaoke into a PlayStation microphone and getting judged for it...here is where it got REALLY interesting. Imagine about 9 kids arguing over the microphones to sing the same 7 or 8 songs over and over again...for almost 3 hours.

IT WAS TERRIBLE! Some of these kids really could NOT carry a tune in a bucket! Some of them could actually sing quite well but it was getting really old coz there was hardly a selection of songs. So...I was pretty sick of it by the end.

We finally set lights out at 3:30 in the morning. After some firm words and a lecture on respect for people who are trying to sleep, I finally heard a sweet, sweet sound at about 4:00...I was never so thankful to hear heavy breathing and snoring in my entire life!

We woke up at 7:30, had breakfast, packed up our stuff and went back to the SingStar (ACK!) for another hour or so before the kids left. It was quite a nice night...a few times I wanted to kill them for being so hyper, but I can't blame them - I was the one that supplied all the sugar and junkfood!

It was a really cool experience...certainly not as bad as some people make it out to be. I was surprisingly rested in the morning, even after so little sleep.

Well, stay tuned for my next entry about my Doubtful Sound cruise!