California Dreamin’

I was completely stressed out all day Wednesday because Wednesday is Party Day. That means planning games, planning snacks, planning decorations. What if the games were too boring? What they were too hard? Too easy? What if no one liked it? What if no one even came?

We went shopping the day before, masterfully located non-German ingredients such as baking soda and vanilla extract, and in the same masterful way, Emily and Oliva (the missionaries’ 7 year old daughter) made American chocolate chip (M&M's in this case) cookies.

Emily had a reader right before the party, so I frantically finished decorations. We had some clip art pictures- a surfer, a sunshine, palm trees shells, some “common California catch-phrases” like “radical” and “totally gnarly dude!”















You know, typical California stuff. Oh, I made a cutesie colorful little paper chain as well.

One by one, people started showing up. Turns out that everyone, except for the couple people that specifically said that they were unable to come, came. In total, the name tags read: Jing, Vincent, Jing’s Mommy, Aliya, Gina, Caroline, Susan, Janine (our rockin’ saxophonist, also spelled Ja9), Dietlind, Annette (our house mom), Annemarie (Annette’s 3 year old daughter), Gerald (Church member who so dutifully kept Annemarie occupied), Abby (me), Emily (my German speaking, cookie baking, gelato introducing, culture-shock softening counterpart), Brianna (wife part of the Randy and Brianna Carroll Missionary Team).

The first game was the “What’s my number?” Where everyone was given a number and had to go around and meet the others numbers. Example: Find out #7’s favorite color. When was the last time #11 played football? Shake hands with #3 in two different ways.















The next game was Mad Libs, where the party members supplied “unique” nouns, adjectives, names, etc. to fill in the blanks of a rather normal, boring story.

We split the party into two groups for the next game. We had the “Crazy Cookies”














with Susan, Brianna, Gerald, Annemarie, Dietlind, and Gina versus “Super five and Mommy” with Janine, Caroline, Aliya (who had to leave early, but was replaced by Marion), Vincent, Jing, and Jing’s Mommy (who was visiting from China and spoke neither German nor English).















Each team was given a stack of index cards with the alphabet written on it. Emily and I would call out a word and the teams would try to spell the word fastest.

































Super five and Mommy kicked rear end on that one.

















Next we stayed in groups to play “The Surfing Game,” which had nothing to do with surfing, but shhhh, don’t tell anyone. We used the numbers from the first game to call on people, who would choose a 1-point, 2-point, or 3-point word to use in a sentence. Everyone aced that game, even though we tried to give hard words to Brianna.

We had snickers for the winners (everyone).

To end the party, Emily and I talked a little about ourselves, talked about California and Pepperdine, and answered questions.













People were most curious about the earthquakes; luckily we had both recently experienced one. Then we cleaned up, kicked everyone out and went home! Oo-dally oo-dally, golly what a day!

Love, Abby and Emily

Give thanks to the LORD, call on his name; make known among the nations what he has done. Sing to him, sing praise to him; tell of all his wonderful acts. Glory in his holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the LORD rejoice. 1 Chronicles 16:8-10