Weekend Update with Kevin Nealon

Here is a breakdown of what happened this past weekend:
Friday
7:00 p.m. Arrived at the church for the young men/ young women volleyball activity.
While the youth were playing I went and filled up the car with liquid gold and did a few other maintenance checks to make sure it was ready to go.

8:30 p.m. "Helped" the youth set up tables and chairs for the young women's dinner auction on Saturday (Actually, they set up the tables and I set up most of the chairs).

9:00 p.m. Loaded up the car with the young men that had shown up for volleyball. Then we had to stop at two of their homes to pick up things they had forgotten.

10:00 p.m. Arrived at the house and loaded the car for the next day. I explained to the young men that I had 4 children asleep in the house and that they had to keep the noise level to a minimum. At this point we only had 3 young men and my secretary at the house. The other young men had a school dance that they were going to and were to arrive later that night. When we went in the house I popped in Grumpy Old Men to get them hyped about fishing the next morning.

10:30 p.m. The 5 young men from the dance arrived. I loaded their gear in the car and gave them the same noise speech that I had given the other group. I told them that they would probably want to get some sleep because we were getting up at 4 a.m. They asked what was for dinner. I told them that they could eat whatever they brought, because I had told them before that we were only providing breakfast and lunch on Saturday. The follow-up question was if they could walk to the local McDonald's. At this point it was already after 11. The answer was no, and that the Poptarts on Saturday were probably going to taste delicious. I had also told them to bring a small backpack, water, sunscreen and bug spray. About 2 of them actually did that.

11:30 p.m. The last of the young men sleeping over arrived. At this point I was already trying to get some sleep. I am very surprised that none of our kids had awoken yet, because they were louder than old people with their hearing aids set on low. There were 3 young men that had said they were going, but still hadn't arrived. I was hoping that they would be at the house when we got up in the morning.

Saturday
1:30 a.m. Just to clarify, this wasn't the first time that I have had that many of them sleep over at the house and in the past the young men have been very well behaved and actually tried to sleep for a couple of hours. However, that wasn't the case this time. I had taken several trips out to the living room to tell them to zip it up and try and get some sleep. There were a couple of them already asleep, but the majority of them had the goal of not going to sleep. They decided that 1:30 would be a great time to take a bunch of pictures with the flash lighting up the room. They were loud enough to keep me from getting any sleep at that point. So, after numerous trips out there, at 1:30 I told them that while they would be able to sleep during the drive, I would not have that luxury. I said that if I had to come out again it would be to start sending some of them home. That seemed to do the trick and they finally kept it quiet.

Sometime between 1:30 and 2:00 a.m. Geronimo started coughing incessantly. We moved him from his room into our bedroom on the floor. Sara gave him some cough medicine, but it wasn't doing the trick. He coughed for the rest of the morning. One of the young men actually complained later on in the day that Geronimo's coughing kept him from getting some sleep (the statement was responded to with eye rolling). Skyler has also woken up. She was complaining that her stomach was hurting. I gave her a children's Pepto tablet and sent her back to bed.

2:00 a.m. Skyler runs to the bathroom and pukes her brains out. Sara goes to help her in the bathroom and I try and see if there is anything I can do to help. Sara takes care of the situation and sets Skyler up with a big bowl in case she has to hurl again. By the time this is all taken care of it is just about 3 a.m. I still hadn't gotten any sleep.

3:30 a.m. Still not being able to sleep, I finally decided to just get up and get ready to go. I got everything else together and loaded the final things into the car.

3:50 a.m. I start waking some of the boys up, at least the ones that were actually asleep. One of them informs me that Skyler has thrown up again. This time she didn't make it to the bathroom. I got Sara and she took care of Skyler while I cleaned the chunks on the carpet.

4:15 a.m. Everyone was awake and ready to go. The second car had shown up (the dad of a couple of the boys was helping out by coming). One of the 3 missing boys was outside waiting for us too. We handed out the Poptarts, had a prayer, and jumped in the cars. I felt really bad leaving Sara to deal with the sick kids, but at 4:15 I really didn't have a back up plan. So, we had 10 young men and 3 leaders on the road to Silverwood Lake. Kyle and Mike were going to meet us there.

5:40 a.m. We arrived at the lake. They don't open the gates until 6, so we had to wait in the line of cars that had gotten there before us. We were around 10th in line. Mike and Kyle arrived a couple minutes after us.

6:15 a.m. We were in and parked. I had gotten all of the fishing gear set up before we left, so I could just hand them their gear and they could put a lure on or set it up for bait. I learned my lesson about not doing that on a previous trip. Unfortunately, a couple of them had brought their own gear and didn't let me check it out before. I wanted to put new line on their reels, but they never came by. It turns out that they should have. At one point I actually did cut off all the line from one of the reels and put new line on it.

6:30 a.m. Lines started hitting the water. Mike and Kyle were smart and moved as far away from us as possible. I expected that I would spend most of my morning helping them with snags and other various problems. That is exactly what happened. It was between 9:00 and 9:30 when I finally got to cast for the first time. The worst part was that nobody was catching any fish. I discovered why. They were putting bait on the hooks of the lures and basically dragging it through the water. Others were set up for bait fishing and would immediately reel in after casting. My advice was falling on deaf ears and when they weren't catching any fish I wasn't surprised. However, there were some of them that were listening and getting the hang of what they needed to do. As the day went on I spent less time helping them and more time casting out my own lure. Kyle caught a nice sized rainbow trout and that was the only fish caught by our group. The young men did catch plenty of other things though. They caught tons of moss, each other, trees, and me a whole bunch. I got hooked in the leg, arm, back, and hands numerous times. I even got poked in the eye by the tip of a rod. I was busy enough helping all the young men that I didn't really take the time to snap very many pictures. I regret not having a group picture. Here a few of the ones I did take:



At around 10:30 there was a large group of the youth mentioning a desire to be done fishing. Going on no sleep and even less patience, I was more than ready to head back home. Sara had hooked us up with a couple loaves worth of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We split those up between the two cars along with some Pringles and Gatorade and headed back home. My eyelids got a little heavy toward the end of the drive, but everyone else in the car got at least a good hour of sleep. When we got back to the house I unloaded the gear and loaded it in the other cars in record time and they were of to their homes. That was around 1:30.

Skyler was still not well enough to come with us to the baptism, so family pictures would have to wait for another day. Sara's mom was nice enough to come stay with Skyler while the rest of us went to the baptism. While Sara was getting everyone else ready to go I was able to squeeze in a quick trip to the church bookstore for Bryan's gift.

We arrived at the church a couple of minutes after 3:00 and had to wait for some other family members to find their way (Kyle would like to add GPS to his Christmas list). Mike did the ordaining and one of Jed's old Young Men's leaders, Keith, was able to make it out. Keith has always done a good job of being there for Jed. Here is a picture of those who were involved in the ordination.

The ordination was followed by the baptismal service. Three people were baptized. Bryan was the last of the 3 to get dunked. I finally was able to get a little nap in during the talk on baptism. Cyndi gave a talk on The Holy Ghost.


Then, Bryan was confirmed (twice) by Jed. I say twice because somebody whispered to him to say the confirmation part again. Perhaps they had been going on zero sleep too, and weren't paying attention when he said it right the first time. Here is a photo of the people who were in the confirmation circle:
After the meeting was over we went to a park in Mexico to have some pizza and salad. A pizza eating competition was rumored to occur, but after seeing Mr. Mustachio load up his plate with 8 pieces to start the rumor was put to rest.

Here are some other photos taken that day:





Have a nice day.