The Oregon Trail

Today, Mommy and Daddy gave voice to a few pioneers traveling west along the Oregon Trail!  There was an old educational video game that went by this name, and things could turn devastating rather quickly.  One moment, you're just driving along fine, and the next, your oxen are exhausted, you lost 91 pounds of food, and your daughter drowned trying to cross a river.  Josh did a masterful job animating this to look just like the old game, which you can see a clip of to the left here.  William in the wagon somehow broke his arm - or his leg- which is confounding since he's never actually left the wagon to begin with.  The spirit of the whole thing is about 'holding on,' which is of course a big rodeo theme we have going on for our first service at Kidpak with "Trailblazers."

Today was spent getting the writing finished up.  Gathering music was easy, with all the cowboy music we have in our arsenal.  The costuming took a bit of effort, as we were shopping at various places throughout Gainesville for this or that.

Madison was along for the day.  With Hall County in Fall Break, there was no Nutcracker practice this morning.  So we were able to sleep in, and then get straight to work on all the preparations for the new series.  That's pretty much all the time we had for today.

Hey, take a look at the awesome display case that Mommy put together:

We got a bunch of stuff from Hobby Lobby, printed posters from online, and used the sand from Tattooine last week too.  Or Jakku.  Anyway, it was sand.  Now it's New Mexico.  Or Texas.

We went to bed tonight pretty tired, but we're ready to hit the trail tomorrow.  It's going to be a great series that will carry us a few months - maybe even until the end of the year.  There's just something wonderful about cowboys and westerns and so forth.  By the end of this series, there'll be kids in cowboy hats and lots of "Yee-haws!"

Uh… well, hopefully.  Right now, everyone is pretty exhausted!