Easter and Arie

Here're pictures from Easter day:

We had breakfast and the little kids found Easter eggs. (They were hidden in the fellowship hall, not the sanctuary.)

(Dad heard of some school somewhere calling Easter eggs "spring spheres." The crazy teachers! Everybody knows Easter eggs aren't spheres! And calling them something else doesn't change that everybody knows what Easter eggs are. :P )

(All these pictures in this post are taken by Mom, by the way. I was busy.)

The altar was pretty. I think it looks naked on Good Friday because it's bare of everything. The big cross doesn't come off the wall so it's draped with a black cloth. The altar stays like it does in that picture until the Easter season is over. (Unless the lilies die. Then there are other flowers up there.)

(That's why I was busy. One cannot hold a flame-thrower and take pictures at the same time.)

They practiced once before Easter and did a really good job.

Reading the Bible. (Because if he was preaching, he'd be on the other side of the altar.)

That thing that looks like a speaker is called a cajon.

Also, these pictures are taken by Mom because she and Dad had to go to a boring old regional conference. On the way there and back they visited Lizzie and Justin for a while. And I stayed all by myself at home without any major accidents. Like explosions or exploding cats. (I was there alone for about five days and began to really not understand what the big deal about housekeeping taking forever is. Because I did clean, do laundry, wash dishes, and scrubbed the floors. It didn't take THAT long.)

She got that for Christmas and loooooves it.

(Both Lizzie and Arane have had their respective heads of hair looking that way ever since I can remember. Arane's is goofy and Lizzie's is pretty. :P )

That fuzzy thing is her kitty. (She says a "kkkkk" noise at all animals to say that they're kitties.)

And she can walk-ish now.

(That was at the local museum. I don't think Lizzie would let a whatchacallit like that yellow-blue-green do-dad in the background into her house.)

The Crazy Stuff That Goes On Around Our House

I'm a pastor's kid, which means that I have to remember the names of about 150 people are without asking too much. (And most of the people are either related to each other, white haired old people, or both.) (About half of the people in church are cousins either by birth or marriage. About half of the non-related people are shut-ins, don't go out much in the winter because it's cold, or migrate to Florida like birds when it's cold. That gives me plenty of time to forget their names.)

Around church, I acolyte, altar guild, help with Confirmation, sew quilts for LWR, visit people with Dad, take messages, relay messages, and get to chase salesmen away with the magic words, "Actually, this is a parsonage, so we'd have to ask the church council." (And then have to explain what a parsonage is.)

Confirmation class is the goofiest thing that I've helped with. There are five people taking it between the ages of seven and twelve. (Two others hang around because their older brother takes it.) Normally, it goes something like this:

3:00--Dad and I get to the church.
3:15--Kid 1 arrives. He asks if we have the treasure box today. I say to ask Dad.
3:20--Kids 2 and 3 arrive. They start playing ball with Kid 1. (Once, they managed to smash a light-bulb. I'm not sure how they managed it because the light bulb was on a window ledge behind a Christmas tree.)
3:25--Kid 4, his grandma (who helps, too), little sister, and little brother arrive. The little brother asks, "What are you doing?" really excitedly. He does that even when I'm just standing there waiting for Dad to tell me what to do.
3:30--Kid 5 arrives. Dad starts corralling the kids to the table. We sing, pray, and Dad starts teaching the lesson. Kid 1 asks questions about everything from "When did Abraham live?" to "When are we eating?"
4:15--We eat. (Popcorn, lemonade, and cookies.) At least four spills are required to take place in this time. (I'm getting skilled at wielding paper towels.)
4:45--Dad tests memory work. Most people remember it after the third try.
5:15--We sing, sometimes have the treasure box. The treasure box currently has sticky reptiles and amphibians, jelly slugs, paper airplane kits, ice-cream poppers, and stuff like that. (Somehow, Kid 1 got a jelly slug stuck to a beam. He tried to get it down, then I tried, then got Kid 2, who's three inches taller than I, who did manage to get it down.)

The thing that makes it goofy is Kid 1, who asks questions all the time. He needs to go read an encyclopedia. A lot of them are good questions (like "How do we know the Bible tells the truth?") and some are off topic (like "How does popcorn pop?"). But the kid never gets all the questions answered because half-way through the explanation, he asks another one. (He also falls out of chairs. I have no idea how, but one minute he's sitting in a chair and the next he's lying on the floor.)

The Confirmation class kids really like it when we do something around the church, like set up for Communion or burn palm leaves or fill candles. (Dad told me to tell about the candle oil and the first thing I said was, "DO NOT DRINK THIS! It is not water! You drink it and you die!" Then Kid 1 asked why, and what we'd do if he did drink it, and Dad said, "Make you throw up then call the ambulance." Then had to explain how to make somebody throw up. Nobody drank the candle oil.) Last Wednesday, the kids helped me with the altar guilding for Ash Wednesday. They put up purple paraments, new hymn numbers (even the four year old helped), filled candles, mixed ash with olive oil and put crosses on each other's foreheads, filled Communion cups, tried wafers (they taste like Styrophom when fresh and are even worse when stale), learned about why there are five crosses on the fair linen (the cloth that's on top of the altar; it has five crosses for the five wounds Jesus had), looked at the button that turns the sound system on, and learned about the Divine Service. (And were told the story about the time Martin Luther spilled some consecrated wine on the floor and so licked it up.) That was a full and pretty smooth class. It hardly ever happens.

Reformation Day and All Saint's Day

On October 31, 1517 an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther nailed the 95-Theses to the Castle Church in Wittenberg and accidentally started the Protestant revolution. (We're Protestant because we protested against the Catholic Church. The "ant" is just a handy Latin left-over.) (If people want to nail topics for debate to a church door, check to see if the door is glass first. If the door is glass, there's a nifty new invention called tape, which is a kind of sticky paper. Use that instead; most pastors don't like it when they go into the church and find out the door is shattered. They prefer nail holes.)

On November 1, every year for centuries, Christians remember the other Christians who have died. Only Catholics, as far as I know, are the ones who pray for the saints. Most Lutherans probably ignore All Saint's Day, but some will actually remember the saints. (Also, all Christians are saints. Even the alive Christians. But I wouldn't go up to Aly and say, "Hey, Saint Aly, how're you?" because that'd be goofy.

On, and Reformation Day is a civil holiday in Germany, according to Brigitte--a native German in my Greek class and one of Dad's classmates.

Also, go here for a good post by Veith: http://www.geneveith.com/2012/10/31/reforming-the-church/. (I don't know if Veith is a pastor, lay-person, professor, or what. We always call him Veith around the house.)

Confirmation and Dance Recitle

(On the same day.)

Sarah, Blake, and Dad before the service. They've had lots of pastors in the past two years, which means there was a kinda rough Confirmation class. They survived, though.

The Confirmation was between the Creed and the Offering. Sarah played the clarinet during the offering.

Afterwards, they said why they wanted to be Confirmed here.

And took Communion with their families for the first time. They took it during class the week before, actually, so they knew what liturgy, wine, and bread were like. I took the same class as they did (for fun) and got to take it with them.

I skipped the celebration to get ready for the recital. Here's the picture of the class and the costumes. Those blurs are from where I erased the name of the studio and stuff.

Afterwards, we went to a restaurant with Mrs. Spenn, the lady who went with us to the recital. Dad was helping with tickets and so couldn't use his seat so we asked Mrs. Spenn to come along. She's one of my friends and is in her 90s.

I also got a flower. It's the first time. Haha. It made the car smell really good. I used my water bottle for a vase on the way home.