Exciting Week-end Experience

I had a great night last night. I attended my first Youth Conference dance as a Young Women leader. This week or should I say the three last days of this week is Youth Conference. They started out with registration, dinner and dance last night. As a Beehive Adviser I was asked to help with dinner and to chaperon the dance. It was a lot of fun and very interesting.

So registration and dinner started out in the Stake Center and then the dance was held at Turtle Bay. I dropped my daughter Jen and her friend who's sleeping over for the whole conference with my son Chris at the Stake Center at four p.m. came home, made dinner for the hubby and the four younger kids (hubby's assumed to role of babysitting for the night) and went back to the Stake Center at five. Dinner was great!! Daughter, Steph, was finishing up her last hours of service project for her Health Class at the clinic so she didn't get to the Stake Center til about 6:30 when it was time to board the bus to leave for their dance.

Once all the youth and most of the leaders left for Turtle Bay, our Ward's Young Women President, one her counselor and I stayed behind with couple of other leaders from the ward to clean up all the serving pans, trays and utensils and then load our cars with the desserts to take to the dance.

When we got to Turtle Bay, the dance had started and the kids were dancing up a storm. It was very interesting watching the kids dance. (I was really excited to be able to go so I can spy on my kids using my calling as a disguise.) So when we entered the dance room there was cluster of kids on the dance floor dancing and when I say cluster, meant it just as it sounded. The kids were packed together on the dance floor and quite frankly I couldn't figure out how they could dance like that being sooo close together like that and they weren't slow dancing, mind you.

The first thing I did was scope out my kids just to make sure they were in the dance room instead of roaming around somewhere else. I spotted Jen and her friend first on the dance floor...that's good, one down and two to go. After a slow sweep inspection, I found my son Chris (did I mention this is his first Youth Conference?) sitting in a corner as far away from the entrance door as he could muster, just sitting there looking as bored as he could possibly be. A ninety degree turn of the head a minute later, I spotted my daughter Steph sitting on chair too on the opposite end from her brother, just sitting there watching the dance. I was feeling pretty good myself then, all three are where they're supposed to be.

Now I don't know if this happen anywhere else on the island or on the mainland. That's why I find this interesting. You see while the kids were dancing, I noticed that the girls are dancing by themselves in their own group while the boys are doing the same thing in another group. There was no boy dancing with girl at all on the dance floor. So the other two leaders and I set out on the dance floor to try and put our clever heads to work by rearranging the arrangement the kids have made for themselves on the dance floor to have boys dance with the girls instead of girls dancing with girls and boys dancing with boys. I even pulled my son up, very reluctantly on his part, on the dance floor to dance with me. After the dance, I noticed that daughter Steph was still sitting in the same spot she was when I entered so I sauntered over to her try to get her to the dance floor. Boy, she was one grumpy teenager. She didn't want to dance, she's hungry and she didn't want to be there in the first place, she practically shouted it out to me. (Ok, so everybody had to shout if they want to be heard above the music.)

So I left her alone and went back to the refreshment table to help pass out the desserts. And the most wonderful thing happen, {well to me anyways since it was about my kid} my daughter Steph got off her chair when the refreshments was served to get her share. (We served banana cream pies, ooh yum.) She got seconds and after her second she disappeared on the dance floor and stayed there til the end. Two hours of dancing non-stop.

After the desserts, we kept ourselves busy trying to get the kids to dance with each other girl boy, boy girl instead of the boy boy and girl girl. We noticed that they would dance the way we want to them for like a few seconds and when we leave them, they go back to their original form. Tonight there's another dance and our Ward is in charge of it, so after seeing the way the kids just can't seem to break away from their same gender cluster dance, we have come up with a ton of ideas of what to do tonight to get them to dance the way we've been trying to get them too. And the DJ, he was no help at all, he kept playing fast songs so the kids did not feel the need to pair up the right way to dance. Three hours of dancing and he played only three slow songs. The whole idea behind the dance was to get the boys to dance with the girls not the other way around. Despite all that, it was a fun night and the kids did enjoy themselves.

We've come up with loads of ideas to use for the dance tonight, we even thought about bribing them too. Today, I'm going through my rubber stamps to pick out some small ones to take with me, we're going to be stamping the kids hands whenever they dance with the opposite sex and after they've accumulated a certain number of stamps on their hands, they will be allowed to have their desserts. They don't know about that yet so it would be really fun to watch their faces when we checked their hands for the proof..sneaky uh? We're also going to see about making the music to be on a ratio of 3:1, three fast songs to one slow song and we're going to do that, I think it's called snowball or something like that but we'll use some other word that fit the theme or maybe some Hawaiian word, to have the kids switch partners, partners as in boy with girl. I am really excited to see how it turn out.

Did I mention how much I love my new calling and how excited I am about being in the Youth program? I am, totally!! Today the youth will be doing service project at Turtle Bay, I won't be able to go help out with the morning activities, hubby will be working and I don't have anyone to watch my little girl but I will go later in the afternoon to help set things up at the chapel. So I need to get off here and go take my teens back to the Stake Center this morning; they're having breakfast there and then board the bus to get them to the designated place again. I will be updating y'all about how the dance go tonight and the progress of today's activity. Hopefully I'll remember to bring my camera this time, I am such a dunce sometimes.

By the way, if you haven't done it yet and would really like to win a prize, do check out Lilly's give-away, click on her name or check above this post to get you there. Do check out her blog, see what an amazing woman she is and help her out with her cause, aight? Thanks!! And have a great Aloha Friday!!

God bless!!