Yesterday was the last day of our Twinkle programs for this semester. Even though public schools aren’t out for another month, our volunteers are in finals week and packing to leave early next week. There’s no way we can run 10 programs without our college volunteers, especially since many of our programs run simultaneously. The processed nacho cheese and I can only be in one place at a time, ya’ll.

All semester long, my Twinkle girls have begged me to bring a craft that involved making jewelry. Never mind that we have made tissue paper butterflies, princess picture frames and even paper bag puppets — they wanted jewelry.

Unfortunately, I’ve had a bit on my mind recently and forgot about the jewelry craft request until approximately one hour before Twinkle was scheduled to start. I jumped in my car and went to a few different stores looking for enough jewelry making kits for all four of our Twinkle programs that were ending yesterday. I figured that if my Twinkle girls wanted craft jewelry, the girls at the other three elementary schools couldn’t be too different.

I finally found what I was looking for at a price we could afford. The store had the exact amount of kits I needed, so I loaded them up in my arms and headed for the register. And that is right about the time I dropped one of the kits and watched as 250 foam beads rolled across the floor.

Fabulous.

The store clerk offered to clean up the mess after I left, but after I explained that I had to pick them up because I needed ALL of the foam beads in order to make sure ALL the little girls got to make bracelets. The clerk just shook her head sadly and walked away while I began to crawl around on the floor to retrieve my 250 foam beads.

After several awkward moments on the floor, I had gathered all the beads (I think) and made my way to the front of the store. I was two steps away from the register when I dropped another container of 250 foam beads.

I’ll skip boring you with the details of how I — once again — crawled around the floor picking up foam hearts and circles and triangles. I will, however, say that I had an excellent lesson in humility right there on that cold, hard floor.

The REAL struggle, however, came when I actually arrived at my Twinkle program. After snack, we let the girls each pick out 10 foam beads for their bracelets. Let me suggest to you that it isn’t the best idea to pour out 1,000 foam beads in front of a bunch of elementary school girls. We literally had to have a time limit on the foam-bead-choosing-process.

We handed out the string and told the girls to start beading away. After about 3.7 seconds, we realized that we had A Major Problem on our hands: the foam bead kit required the use of a plastic needle to thread the beads onto the strings.

Even just typing that makes me a bit sick to my stomach.

And so, for the next hour, I and the rest of our volunteers used plastic needles to thread brightly colored beads onto purple string while a bunch of girls surrounded us saying “My bracelet next!” followed by “No, mine!”

Hundreds of foam beads, ya’ll. Hundreds.

At one point, I looked up and caught Katie’s eye from across a couple of tables. She immediately mouthed a loving sentiment to me that looked a little like “I hate foam beads but, right now, I hate you more.”

I totally must have misunderstood what she was mouthing to me because how could she not love someone who brought 1,000 foam beads to be threaded in less than an hour? I know, right?

But by the end of the foam beading festival, I had lost my warmfuzzy-ness and was definitely on my way to becoming a cold prickly. In fact, I took a picture of myself at this point just so I could share it with you:

Oh, I’m kidding. I didn’t have time to take a picture because I was still threading foam hearts onto string.

Ministry is so glamorous, no?

Don’t forget to enter the contest for 12 free hair products — that’s right, I miscounted the first time around and there were more products than I thought!