GEMS Sleep over and Ice Creame Social

Hello, it’s Christine here. 

This is something new for me – my first time ever blogging.

What better place to start than here on Ron’s site with his loyal band of followers!  I’m here to show everyone what an awesome time we had at a couple of GEMS events this year. 

I usually give an update on GEMS Sunday at church but Ron has taken over that service with his Peru update so in return, he is allowing me on his blog. How very nice of him.

For those of you who don’t know, GEMS stands for Girls Everywhere Meeting the Saviour and it is the girls program at Calvin CRC for girls in Gr.2-6.  Our regular evenings consist of working on various badges. Some of the badges earned this year were: 

Women of the Bible, 

Fitness,

Heaven, 

Candy-making (always a favourite),

Photography, and 

Scrap booking.  

We also had a theme night where the girls earn a theme badge. This year’s theme was Get Wisdom: Go Beyond the Gold!

We had a special visit from Sheila Dykstra one night (I think Ron put that on here before).  Some other special events were a dress-up night, our sleepover and the end of the year Ice Cream Social. We really wanted to build Kub Kars and race the boys but we just didn’t have the time or knowledge required for this year. (The boys think that we were scared to lose).  But stay tuned, next year’s planning has already begun.

GEMS Sleep Over!

What follows now are some photos of our sleepover and the Ice Cream Social.

This is the room before everyone arrived.  

And after.

The older girls decided to move into a room of their own. Good thing too as there were a few in here who tried to stay up all night. 

At least the other room was allowed to sleep.

We didn’t have just girls at this sleepover. No we were protected by many various stuffed animals!

Look this one has a human body!

This one was bigger than a toddler. 

I actually did feel safer near it.

The fun of being a leader in GEMS for me is having my own daughter there. She was the youngest girl this year. (And the cutest in my opinion but I may be a bit biased).

After the girls got set up and ran around a bit, they did a craft led by Wilma and Amy D. 

I’ll take this opportunity to thank them so much for doing our craft nights this year.  It really gives us counsellors a break and they come up with the greatest ideas. Here are some samples of the craft this time.

After craft we had a games time. We did some freeze-dancing and then Sardines throughout the church.

After this we watched a movie and the girls then went straight to sleep – yeah right.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyways so I decided to stay up the night and read a good book. 

I thought maybe I’d be able to fall asleep around 2 am or so but no, some girls took shifts in trying to stay up the whole night. They certainly were determined!  I’m just glad I didn’t have to be around those girls the next day. 

Sorry parents.  : ) 

We had an awesome group of counsellors this year: Cheryl, Jackie, Lena, Mouy and Leanne. Cheryl told me in planning that she doesn’t do sleepovers BUT that she would come and make us all breakfast. Well that turned out to be the best deal ever because I certainly was in no mood to cook in the morning.  

It was April 1^st though so some of our food looked a little strange, but it still tasted great.

Note the green tinge on the pancake.

Yay Cheryl!!!

Ice-Cream Social - Year Ender!

Now for a few photos of our Ice Cream Social. The girls our allowed to invite one or two special women in their lives along for this evening. I think we ended up with around 45 women and girls. It always lots of fun.

 Here we are playing a getting-to-know-you game involving our shoes.

See, a shoe.

Then some moms and daughters took turns playing a Newlywed-style game. 

After that it was time for ice cream and socializing!

Hey Ron, who are these two people?  : ) 

We ended the evening by giving the girls their badges and some gifts and saying goodbye to the Graduating girls in Grade 6.

These are the six girls who will be moving on from GEMS. We’ll miss you.

Group shot.  

We had a most helpful Dad just behind the photographer making us all laugh.

Thanks to everyone who helped make GEMS a great event this year. We really had a fun time together learning and playing. Thanks also to those who prayed for our program. We truly did feel that God has blessed our time this year.