At 5:00 I wasn't so sure we were even going to be able to have family night because three out of the four kids had big school projects to work on. It's hard to have so many kids working on projects when we only have 2 computers. Also, the dishwasher isn't working so we had a mountain of undone dishes, and we had no food for a picnic because I wasn't able to go grocery shopping during the day like I usually do. I couldn't go to the store at that point because I was helping kids with projects. Then Brian whose second job is repairman for a laundry 20 minutes away, called from the laundry to tell me he had his car all "pulled apart" to work on it but was missing a tool he needed to change the faulty part in order to put it all back together again. Also, it was getting kind of chilly outside to be picnicking and playing anything AND we couldn't find the frisbee, a very important piece of equipment in playing possible/impossible which is the game we wanted to play. Anyway, things were absolutely crazy.
There was something going for us, however, which was prayer and praying helped everything else work out. I'd been praying since Sunday night that we would know what to do for family home evening and that we'd be able to have family night. I knew from experience that a lot of things can work against having family time. Sometime after praying on Monday morning, I thought that if no better idea came along, it might be nice to play possible/impossible as a family; a game we made up and which I will explain later, and have a picnic. It was good to have a plan, in fact if we hadn't had a plan, small as it was, we probably would have given up at the point where everything was looking pretty bleak. Well, in the next hour, things all worked themselves out. Miriam, the only kid without homework, saved the food crisis by baking rolls for chicken salad sandwiches while I took Katrina to the library to interview the librarian (which was part of her project). After a quick prayer, I asked Matt to look for frisbee one last time, and he found it. Yay! Brian walked to Autozone so that I didn't have to come give him a ride there, and Thomas and Matt worked out how they could finish their projects later. We finished the sandwiches and cut the carrot sticks together, put on hoodies so we wouldn't get chilly, loaded up, and were on our way to Brian by 6:15.
We met him at Autozone and drove him back to the laundry. He put the car back together (at this point, I actually took a 15 minute power nap which was so great!), and then we went to the park, ate our meal and had a rousing game of possible/impossible. So, what's the game? It's pretty simple. Two people start throwing the frisbee back and forth. Everyone else are the judges. If someone misses a throw, the judges vote on whether the throw was possible or impossible to catch. If the throw was possible to catch, the catcher is out; if it was impossible to catch, the thrower is out. Then the other player becomes "king" for the moment and one of the judges becomes a player. We keep playing, rotating in as people get out, applauding amazing catches, awarding style points, arguing over who gets out, bragging about being the king, and having a great time. When we finally got too cold, we loaded up, took Brian back to his car at the laundry, and all drove home. That was family night. Things don't always work out so well, and people don't always cooperate so well, but the more we persist, the more we are rewarded! I know that prayer makes possible what seems to be impossible!
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