Fall Festival

Kate the evil witch and me the good witch obviously we fit our roles well! 

In the background behind the wicked witch is the “tunnel” I wish I had taken a better picture of it.

Every year our ward usually does a trunk or treat, but we decided to change things up and did a little carnival type thing.  The young men and young women were over it and we have been since forever I guess, but every year it just sneaks up on us. This year we wanted the youth to be over most of it and really get a feel for what all goes into planning and preparing a ward party. I am pretty sure they had no idea that so many hours went into planning it.  It was nice to see them working so hard.  We had a planning committee that had a few leaders and about 4 youth the first week, but luckily the number of youth grew each week.  I don’t know about other churches, but our church has had a huge problem with kids always wanting to go and jump on the stage and off the stage, so we wanted to come up with something to help block them from it.  The young men did a great job. They got the big plastic strips and made a little maze going under the stage and completely blocked the stairs completely.  It worked like a charm and all the kids loved going through the tunnel!  Then we had a fishing station, a cupcake walk, face painting, bean bag toss, a ring toss, glow in the dark games, a coloring station and pin the nose on the jack-o-lantern.  We had a great turn out and everyone seemed to be having a good time. The kids were each assigned a station and got to hand out treats to the kids after they played.  I know my kids had a great time with all the games and prizes.  We also had a chili cook off and a costume parade.  David made the chili for us and got an award for tastiest chili. He was pretty proud of himself.  It was really good! Our family won an award for our costumes and David won for his costume too and was proud to be called Tin man Torgerson!  That whole day was so busy. I was doing all the last minute prep for all the games and browning the meat for David’s chili and making cupcakes and trying to get everyone ready. I think we went to the store about 6 times that day for last minute things that we kept forgetting.  I was so exhausted by the time I got home that night. My feet were shaking and I was so excited to finally just lay there and not do a thing.  The good news is that for next year we know what will need to be done and we have a lot of things from this year that we can reuse, which is awesome. 

All in all it was a big success and I am so glad that it is over!  Now just Young Women in Excellence to plan and then we are done for the year…until new beginnings. It turns out there is no down time in this calling, but it is so great to work with such great and fun youth and leaders!