After we left Pump It Up, we headed to one of our partner churches to spend the night. We connected with this church a couple of years ago and, since then, I have grown to love this particular church more each time I’ve visited. They hosted us for the night in their youth area which, in other words, means that half of us had couches to sleep on while the other half took air mattresses!

Listen, when you’re trying to sleep 20 people and 50% of them get couches, it’s definitely cause for celebration.

Once we got all of our stuff inside the church, I told the girls to change into their pajamas and meet me in a particular room within 5 minutes. Because I am bossy like that, yo.

When they returned, Allie and I made them cover their eyes with their hands (the power we hold is obviously getting a bit out of control) while we placed a gift in each of their laps.

Let me pause in the story to explain the gifts to those of you who didn’t participate: back when I asked for help from Christmas elves, I ended up having enough people that wanted to “adopt” each of my girls to ensure they got a gift. These blog readers not only shopped for a gift for “their girl” but also wrapped it and mailed it to the Starlite office over the past few weeks where I’ve hiding them ’til this event.

We are sneaky like that.

Once we let the girls open their eyes, they went crazy, again. I explained how the gifts came to be and I think they just were in complete shock. We spent a lot of time opening the gifts, going from one girl to another as the whole group watched to see what she got. As we went around, I tried to tell them as much as I knew about their particular “adoptee.”

The most amazing part of watching them open their gifts was seeing how perfect the gifts were for each of them. My latte drinking girls got Starbucks gift cards, my cold natured girls got scarves and, in what may go down as the loudest scream of the night, our sweet Disney-Princess-Obsessed-Jenelle got a bag FULL of Disney princess items. I know this will sound trite, but I would rather get to watch them open those gifts all over again than open any gifts myself this Christmas.

Unless someone wrapped up a large case of Sunny Delight and slipped it under the tree for me. Because, please, let’s not be ridiculous… it’s not like I’m going to turn that junk down.

Mom? Did you see that hint? SUNNY DELIGHT. CASE. UNDER THE TREE.

After we opened the gifts, we had Sappy Girl Time where we went around the circle telling each of our favorite memories from Starlite this semester. I then took a few minutes to thank them profusely for their work this semester before telling them to hurry and get in bed because we had church the next morning.

Listen, someone’s gotta be the bad girl.

It wasn’t too hard to get them to go to sleep, however, since the final surprise wasn’t taking place until the next day…

You’re reading Part 4 in a series of posts about our surprise weekend for our Starlite leaders.  To read all the posts — and in the correct order! — go here.