Christmas activity of the day #1

This morning we went to the stake primary party (to practice our songs for the stake sing-along tomorrow evening), only we drove to the stake center instead of the Lawrenceville building...so we ended up being 15 minutes late to the party. 

First of all, I have to commend whichever ward's Christmas party we stumbled into—because the stake center was a hip-hop-happening place! They were having a pancake breakfast (which smelled delicious, but was a sign we were in the wrong place) and they had a cookie decorating station set up (a sign that we were perhaps in the right place) and all sorts of fun things going on. Noticing our confusion (and general not-quite-fitting-in demeanor), someone came up to us and asked us if we meant to be at the ward party or the stake primary party.

The latter! 

They invited us to join them, said they'd love to have us, and had plenty of everything to go around...but also pulled up the email about the primary party so they could verify the details for us. 

So nice of them...and entirely our bad. We should have read more carefully.

We arrived at the right building fashionably late, but it didn't even matter because—let me tell you—my hat is off to this primary presidency. They plan the sweetest little activities. It honestly doesn't matter if you're 15 minutes late because you've missed nothing. They typically have little rooms set up for the kids to filter through at will. However long the kids are engaged in the activity is how long they're welcome to stay in the room. So if you're late, you just hop in somewhere and start having fun. It works very well! Especially, I think, for a situation like ours where people are sometimes travelling quite a distance to be there...and/or then drive to the wrong building first.

Today they had a little crafting room where the kids put together an ornament of Baby Jesus:

They had a cookie decorating room with gingerbread to decorate and lots of other snacks (including the promised hot chocolate—this event was touted as "Cookies, Cocoa, and Carols"). 

Then they had some game rooms set up. One seemed to be a snowball throwing game (the room was full of pompoms) and another was drop-in bingo (you could stay to play until you got bingo—the kids had little Christmas stamps they could use on their papers). It was a great time!

Toward the end they gathered all the children to practice singing the songs they'll be singing tomorrow and...yeah! It was a lovely morning. 

When I thanked Sister Branum for her wonderful planning, she explained that she has some extremely shy children who take a while to get into activities and get flustered when they're told to stop and move on, so that's why she goes for more of an "open concept" rather than a station-based model or something. It's great and has worked well the last few activities we've gone to.