This gathering was awesome! Altogether, I think 7 people came. Please forgive me if I missed someone! I'm just now catching up on the posts and it's been three weeks. :)
Lisa was the first to come again (thank you Lisa!). Earlier in the week I had blown eggs by poking a tiny hole in both ends of an egg and blowing on one end so the yoke and the white come out the other end. They had dried on the inside by then so now we painted them with acrylic paints. By then more people had shown up, among them Kaylee and Aria, and they painted their eggs, too.
While we waited for the eggs to dry, we painted little votive jars with different designs like stripes and polkadots and we put them on wax paper on a cookie sheet. One or two more people showed up around then and we started folding origami hearts. When those were done, we opened them back up and (here's where the "time capsule" part of this activity comes in) we wrote notes on them to our future husbands. Then we wrote notes to our future selves. Around that time, most of the painted eggs had dried, so I instructed everyone to try and roll up their notes to their future selves (not husbands) and put them into the eggs through one of the holes. That kind of worked. Some of the holes were too small, since I didn't test them beforehand. But we just rolled up the paper super tightly and got our notes in. Lisa actually wrote a whole page's worth of "letter." When she tried to get her paper into the egg, she accidentally poked a whole in the other end. Oops!
Everyone started asking, "When do we get to open these?" Without thinking very hard, I replied happily, "Well, you can open them when you're married. Or if you're not married in ten years, you can open them then!" I had gotten the idea from a bucket-list item, "Write a letter to myself and open it in ten years," so that's what I was thinking at the time.
Kaylee said, "But what if I really am not married ten years from now? Will I just sit my cat down in my lap and read the future husband note to them?" She posed all officially and pretended to read it, "'Dear Future Husband, I love you soooo much!'" Everyone cracked up. "And what about the letter to myself?" she continued. "'Dear Future Me, I'm so glad you got married! Congrats!'" Then she mimicked her future self saying, "'Well, so much for that!'" and threw her imaginary paper onto her lap. Everyone laughed.
I was a little flustered but I laughed too and said, "Well... hopefully you'll just be married by then!" and everyone laughed again.
Then Lisa remembered our polkadot votives. I had shown the instructions to everyone earlier so they got an idea of how to do them. Now she reminded me that I was supposed to put them in the oven. (I don't know why the instructions said to do that––they just did.) I checked the instructions again, preheated the oven and such, then put them in, wax paper and all, at the right time and everything.
A few minutes later, something smelled like smoke. I hurried over to the oven, thinking of the jars, and when I opened it, sure enough, a cloud of smoke rushed past my face. I quickly took them out. None of them had broken, nothing tragic had happened. Except now the house was smokey, so I rushed to open a few windows and doors.
A few minutes later I was trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Aria thought it might be the wax paper, maybe it was on the wrong side or something. I still don't know for sure. But they're totally fine now. Whew!! All I have to do is give them to everyone, since they were still pretty warm when it was time to go.
Kate and Shaylee had showed up towards the end because of school so I told them what we were doing. We didn't have any more votive jars or eggs though (because only five people had RSVP-ed), so we gave Kate one of our mason jars to decorate and then her and Shaylee wrote letters to their future selves.
After a few minutes and everyone had been introduced, I said, "Okay, I'm going to give a speech now. I wrote this and memorized it in the past few weeks. Lisa's heard it but it's been improved since then." And it had been. "Alright," I said with an apprehensive smile, "Here goes."
"Welcome to Noble Youth! You read about it in the email––Noble Youth is where we can come together and just get to know each other, gain new skills, learn from each other, and live our standards together. I hope it can be a place where we can love each other, trust each other, confide in each other, and not be afraid to be ourselves. A while ago, I kind of lost track of myself and what my personality is, who Amory is. I’ve been trying to get back to being who that person is and I’ve been successful so far but I had this vision for a place where I could be myself and where I could help everyone be themselves and not have to worry about what other people think, like I did. Everyone should be themself no matter what. So, that’s my goal.
"I thought about naming this Noble Women or something like that, since we’re all girls, but I thought it would be fun to have some times where the young men are invited; I mean, we could watch chick-flicks together, do service projects together, and that would be amazingly fun! So, I left it Noble Youth. Plus, I just thought it sounded cool! :)
"I really hope that we can have a ton of fun as we do things that the Lord would have us do. I invited each of you because I felt that I could trust you with this vision of not only becoming great people but becoming noble people, Noble Youth. I’m very glad that everyone here is interested in supporting that and I’m also very grateful that it’s working out. I think this will be good for each of us, not just me. So thank you, very much, for coming."
Everyone thought it was great. Truthfully, it was only half of a page, it wasn't worded or organized all that well, and it wasn't memorized completely. But I think the thing that everyone liked about it was the feeling behind it. It was written from my heart. That's what counted.
I learned so many lessons this time:
1. Always plan for more people than you expect because sometimes they don't/can't RSVP or they don't know whether they can come until last-minute.
2. Having every element of your supplies helps a lot.
3. Always consult the mother before put oddities in the oven.
4. Keep the conversation going––it helps people get to know each other better and it's good for leadership, speaking, and conversational skills combined.
5. Always introduce everyone to each other.
6. Test everything.
7. Be cheery and confident––it helps create a more relaxed atmosphere.
8. When you give a speech and mess up in front of your friends who don't know what it looks like to mess up, never you fear––they won't notice. Just keep going.
The activity was great, the people were great, and the turn-out was awesome! It's so encouraging when you invite more people and then they really start coming. :D
Amory
