Have You Herd

 Have You Herd
Vacation Bible School is over for the 2024 year. It’s time to rest, recuperate, and reflect on what went over well. I was in the kitchen with two friends. It was our responsibility to choose which snacks we should serve, when to prepare them, and to be there to serve the snacks as the chldren and adults came to the felllowship hall expecting food to eat.
The ideas for food had to be easy to prepare (fewer ingredients), tasty, and had to appeal to the students and teachers. With only had fifteen minutes to grab the snacks, eat them, and be ready for the skits in the main sanctuary, everything had to be ready. Clean up for the kitchen staff followed. Next year we’ll keep some of the favorites, eliminate some that either took too much time or were duds, and we’ll research some new ideas before the next VBS season.
We weren’t responsible for decorating the church for the “farm” theme, but I assisted my daughter Anna Prinkey with her grandiose ideas. Everything from the “County Fair” kitchen to duck ponds, and barns with silos filled each cleassroom with a different theme. No classroom went undecorated, but the kids loved it.
While Anna decorated the side rooms, the converting the main sanctuary into a country barn scene fell to our Pastor Haasz and our summer intern Stephen. Other parishioners brought in articles from their homes to use as decorative props. Fake chickens, pigs, cats, a saddle, lanterns, a scoop shovel, and a pitchfork added authenticity to the dais, but no one had lifesized cows. Real animals were out of the question and that leads to the crux of this post.
I helped the Pastor and Stephen construct a herd of two cows (if two cows can be called a herd). Eventually the two “cows” claimed stalls in the baptistry with their heads peering out over the edge into the sanctuary.
The lives of these two cows began in the garage/shop of the church. Each head was fashioned from four clear plastic gallon water containers. The shape of one container was similar to the muzzle of a cow. When four were cut and taped together, it made the rough cow head-shape. Each shape was covered with papier machet to form each cow head with ping pong eyes and water container screw-on caps for nostrils. Each “head” was fastened to a cardboard neck and then painted. The result was impressive enough to “wow” the kids who came to VBS.