February 7th - Heart Party

To celebrate Valentine's Day, we had a "heart party."  Altogether, 4 people came.  To start, we had an opening song, a prayer, and a discussion.  The topic was, "How do you show more love to your siblings when you can’t stand them or when they’re acting annoying and you just don’t know what to do?" We got some great input there.

I also gave a miniature speech about Noble Youth itself and I'll put that up on one of the following posts.

For the first part of the activity we decorated cookies and then had hot chocolate.  That was... too much sugar.  But we had a good time.  :)  Then we cut out a whole bunch of hearts and wrote little notes on them.  We got creative, too, and cut out all kinds of random shapes.  Lisa decided that she preferred internal organs besides hearts on Valentine's Day.

Lisa's intestine - "My bowels are full of compassion (*and love) for you!"

Lisa's stomach - "A stomach full of appreciation."

Lisa's negative space hearts.

Faith got creative too.  She made all kinds of sarcastic and humorous little things.  And lots of just random things.  Here are just two samples.

Faith's dumpling lady.

Faith's "door knob heart."

Jay decided that she would follow in Faith and Lisa's footsteps.  She made some funny valentines, some really random ones, and also cut out an internal organ––except she decided that she wanted to get real and she actually drew and cut out an authentic heart.  I thought that was pretty much awesome.

Jay's real heart.

And Jay's worm.

We heart-attacked Caden's door.  Indigo showed up right as we were finishing taping everything up and then we called Caden down.  Hiding in the other room, Lisa stuck her arm out and filmed his reaction.  Then we came out and he chuckled and said, "You know I'm never going to take this off, right?"  All of us laughed.  :)

We finished the day by cleaning up and just chatting.  The day had been a learning experience for me about how to lead a group well and was probably a learning experience for everyone else, too, as we got to know each other better.  I learned a lot about how to conduct a meeting (this first one was a lot like Sunday School...  :-/) and I learned things I can do to make the gathering interesting, too.  And it seemed that everyone had a lot of fun!

So––first Noble Youth gathering evaluation?  Success!

Amory