In the two and a half weeks since I last wrote our lives have revolved around Vacation Bible School, and it has consumed Vicki’s life for longer than that. This year’s theme was the SonHarvest County Fair. We have worked hard getting ready for it to happen and then enjoyed being part of it from Sunday evening through Thursday evening. Yesterday, before we had a chance to recover from VBS, Pauline called Vicki saying she felt bad and needed to go to the hospital.
Pauline has had several days over the last few weeks where she admitted to not feeling well. She suspected it was one of the medications she is taking. But she has always bounced back enough to just continue on with her daily routine. Yesterday morning she felt worse than ever. Her doctor ordered several tests and concluded she is anemic due to blood loss. Now we know why she was feeling bad. They gave her three units of blood last night which has helped a lot.
Pauline’s guess about her medication was backed up by her doctor, and he has now ordered some tests to see where she is losing blood. They are going to scope her stomach this morning as part of this. She will be in the hospital at least one more night. We are all very thankful this problem has been found and can be corrected, though she will need time to gain back her strength.
When we called Will and Darice, who were vacationing in Gatlinburg, to inform them about Pauline, they decided to come this way. So, our kids have gotten an unplanned visit with their cousins.
To back up and report on our VBS a bit I must say it was a big success. The farming theme made it really easy for us to decorate this year. As I said, this has occupied most of Vicki’s thoughts for several weeks now. Since coming back from Colorado Springs the kids and I found ourselves fending for ourselves in the evenings more and more. Vicki even took Jenna to work with her several days last week to help her get ready. Jenna proved to be a wonderful right hand woman too. I am not getting as much time off this summer as I normally do so the boys stayed with Pauline a lot. Add trying to keep three yards mowed and I hardly saw the boys at all. (Thank you Kenny for mowing part of Aunt Mar’s yard for me.)
As I have already said, VBS started Sunday night. It ran for four nights with a family night on Thursday. We averaged over 240 people (adults included) for all four nights. The neat thing was that we had over 300 people registered. They just didn’t all come on the same night. Our family night was a lot of fun too. We had all kinds of activities from bull riding, to a watermelon eating contest, to hitting Bro. Bill with pies.
For the past seven years I have made music videos from pictures and video footage taken at VBS. My work schedule made that impossible to do this year. Then we discovered Animoto. For $30 a year you can use this web site to create video slideshows (videos that are 30 seconds or less are free). Mary Alice Yates and Clint Brickles got their cameras out and shot over 1000 pictures over the course of the week. I was able to go through these pictures each night, pick out the best ones, upload them and some music to Animoto, and 15 minutes later I had a music video. We showed a couple of these each night and then uploaded them to YouTube for people to enjoy at home. Here are some URLs if you want to look in on all the goings on at our VBS.
mtcarmelbaptist.shutterfly.com -- Mary Alice uploads all the pictures taken here.
www.youtube.com/mtcarmelbaptist -- Our music videos can be seen here.
Enjoy!
Joe
