Monday, April 02, 2007

Childhood Memories...

I snuggled back into the warm covers as I glanced up at my clock reading 9:00am. Not quite feeling like I can crawl out of bed, I lie and listen to the mumbling out in the hall. Quiet whispers of 'snow' drift under our door, and Hannah lifts herself out of bed a heads towards the window. Lifting the blinds, the gray-ish white light peers through the glass and she responds in despair 'Oh no'. I lift my head, and to my disbelief I see large snowflakes flowing and falling to the ground. It's April 2nd, and our warm weather sunny streak is strangely brought to a halt by snow? The only hope was knowing that our spontaneous west coast weather would probably counteract the snow, and it did indeed. The expected drizzling rain appeared much later that morning, and as I stepped out of my second class I was surprised to be met by the smiling rays of our good friend 'Sunshine'. Just another day with the wacky wonderful weather...
The last few days, I felt like I've returned a bit to my childhood, the more simple days of just playing and being 'free'. It all started with taking a walk Friday afternoon, and just letting my thoughts flow and my heart settle in peace after having some good prayer time. I returned to the cafe to grab a dinner and was met by some of my wonderful dorm gals. We had quite an enjoyable dinner full of lots of random conversation and gut-hurting laughter.

Afterwards, we crammed into some cars and took off to go cheer for our dorm girls and guys baseball game. We made some signs, did lots of yelling, but they still lost - yet I think they had more fun than the other team, mainly due to them being the only team with fans.
Once they were done, we all piled onto the kids playground and played games we hadn't played since back in elementary school. It got pretty intense running around, but it was great. We hit up the swings later, played four square, sat on the see-saws, and slid down the slides. Then when the darkness started settling in we headed home, but not before grabbing some smoothies. On Saturday, we had our last Kid's outreach in Vancouver. We blew up a huge amount of balloons to play games with the kids, but before they all arrived, we found ourselves playing with them for quite a while. But it was a good finish off to the year, fun to hang out with the kids and do some fun activities.
That night Janelle, Han, Sarah, Rach and I took off for a mini-adventure and ended up finding a secret hideout with some cool passageways. We then took it upon ourself to go tree-climbing on the 6 cherry trees at school, taking turns telling stories in each tree. And after hoisting Rachel and Janelle up a huge tree to try out the hammock up in the branches, we headed to bed.

Sunday, a few of us went to Fort Langley to toss around a football and walk around the fort. I was excited to find a semi-decent hill which called for hill rolling, then that turned into spinning competitions. Some of us were a little better and spinning and running afterwards, while others ended up getting a few more grass stains.
Then in the evening we had a big dorm tea party. Candace made some treats to eat, and then we made a big 'bowl' of tea. We've yet to get a tea pot, but it's coming soon. It was such a blast, and it reminded me of the many tea parties I used to have with mom in the mornings before school, and all the tea drinking with Nan and Grampa growing up. I think Rika won the tea-drinking competition with her 4 cups, impressive is the only word that comes to my mind.
Thus, even though I know I have a bit more work to finish up before the year is done - it's been refreshing doing some of the more simpler things in life.

3 comments:

Cassie said...

Jen, the weather is the exact same here... nutso... anywho glad you are having some good times, enjoying the little things in life... cant wait to see you in may! Love ya

Yours Truly said...

Hey Kiddo, man, craziness in weather..glad you got some simple momments, aren't they precious? thanks for the inspiration...maybe I'll find a tree tommorow, and I have been dringking more tea :)

Michael P Fast said...

Fun fun, you should write a book, that was a super long post, hope you have a good easter break at home!