erikscottberg.com

Parker “wrote” a song tonight. Kent also performed, but I’ll post that one tomorrow.

Once a month, we have an Open Gym for our youth group. Basically, from 7pm-10pm students run around like crazy and throw balls around. It’s fun, tiring and extremely sweaty. The last hour is always reserved for dodgeball. In fact, sometimes I wonder why we do anything else because most of the students just want to whip a ball at the head of whoever their current crush is. Ah, teen “love.”

Anyway, tonight we played one of my favorite games: Lightning Soccer. We’ve been playing it about every other Open Gym this year, but I think we finally found a formula that works well for our group. Basically Lightning Soccer consists of two tables laying on their long sides on either end of the gym (or playing field). There’s no out of bounds and no goalie. Players can defend, but no one can hold the ball. Teams are made up of four students (or three depending on group size), with at least one member of the opposite gender. The first team to score by hitting the face of the table wins. “Winner stays on” and the next team in line starts with the ball.

The idea is that the game keeps moving and teams try to see who can have the longest winning streak.

Tonight we added on new feature to get the game moving even more: a second soccer ball. It was perfect. Suddenly, 12 year old girls were scoring on 18 year old guys. The games were over fairly quickly which allowed every team to compete several times.

Then, of course, we got a chance to pound each other with dodgeballs for a while. The teams weren’t balanced very well, but as I told Amber, “That’s what happens when you pick your friends and not the people who are actually good at the game you are playing.”

Today was my day off…sort of.

At this point in my life, “day off” means “work around the house.” I fixed Bethany’s user account on our laptop, mowed the lawn, detailed our van (so we call sell it), cleaned the carpet (in the van and our living room) and then ran to the store.

But it got better.

Tonight we had several friends over to watch the season finale of Lost. This has got to be the best show on TV. I love it. After inviting everyone, I got a little worried. I realized with 7 people watching, someone was bound to talk the entire time and distract everyone from the show. Fortunately, this never really became a problem as we were all pretty engrossed in it. Now I have a depressingly long wait until next year until it airs again.

In the meantime, maybe I can use that time to relax.

Wow.

Tonight I read some stories to Parker out of his picture Bible. He wanted me to read three of them in particular, “the Giant,” “Jesus dying on the cross” and “the apple” (in that order).

Well, we didn’t make it to “the apple” but I learned two things from my son in the process.

• A man named Diamond (not Simon) helped Jesus carry the cross. Hmm…maybe he’s been watching American Gladiators too much?
• As I told him about Jesus dying he said, “Oh yeah, then he was died for three weeks…”