Get on the bus!

This week our church hosted a children's Music Camp. Rhett was a "Son Seeker" and Kolby was part of the Nation Vacation Musical.

They both had a blast all 5 days and really enjoyed performing last night. My pictures are not that great. Someday I need to learn how to use my camera! I'll up-load some videos to Youtube and post the links here later.

Here is a blurry picture of Rhett with the Son Seekers.

This is Kolby doing her "Do Unto" dance.

Kolby loves this type of thing and really loved singing her solo in "Oh Happy Day!"


My contribution to Music Camp was making the bus set in the background. When the Children's Ministers asked me to make the bus and I agreed, none of us had any clue how much it would involve. The bus became known as "the beast" in our house. The beast ate 20 hours out of last weekend and more hours out of the last four weeknights than I care to remember. Here is an abbreviated evolution of THE BUS!
It all started with 5 8x4 sheets of cardboard.


Four trips to Wal-mart and two different kinds of primer later...


After 12 hours of drawing, tracing, erasing, re-priming, sweating, and doing it all again, all these bus patterns combined to make up the outline of the "beast."


Many hours of painting, outlining, re-painting and re-outlining later...


Some tense moments with a box cutter, a few hours in Lowe's and a gallon of midnight oil later...the beast stands!


And finally after a few hours of touch-ups and grooming, we had a standing bus that was able to endure the rigors of sharing a stage with 40 or so kids through many rehearsals and a performance ...

not to mention a few dozen photo ops, including this one with 8 kids from my family!

Thanks to my husband who was willing to put the kids to bed by himself every night for 6 nights in a row, my mother who was willing to watch kids during her first three days of summer break, and many others from church who were willing to pitch in... the beast was tamed, mounted and hung and was able to function just as we hoped it would! I love creating. I love painting. I love seeing the end product. I'm not so fond of that long process in the middle. But, I learned a lot and am glad to have contributed to a great Camp!

"The Bus" project also made me really appreciate our two children's ministers who regularly work crazy hours and dedicate many non-office hour hours to do great things for our kids all year long. We are really blessed to have Dana and Renee!

Kolby will have graduated out of the Children's Ministry the next time Music Camp rolls around as we only do this every other year rotating with VBS. She was a little sad that this was her last Music Camp. Kolby would really like to try her hand at children's theater. I guess I need to look into that...

Now I feel like we can finally start to have SUMMER! We all slept late and had a big pancake brunch. Swimming and movies are on the agenda for today. I love summer!