Tonight at our Upstream meeting it was my turn to teach the kids some stuff.

Its not something I do all that often, but it is one of those things I try to do to occasionally. Last week Simmo had us looking at the creation story and as I sat pondering ‘where to’ I felt it could be good to move on from there to the Noah story.

Suddenly ideas were wooshing thru my mind… it was one of those ‘mini-brainwaves’… kind of…

The plan was to make paper boats – you know where you fold the paper and create a boat? We would make the boats and then put people and animals in them and then have a flood!…

So I went to the shop to buy one of those packs of $2.00 plastic farm animals. Hmmm… couldn’t find em. But what I did discover was a pack of jelly babies and a pack of confectionary animals. Even better!!

So I told some of the story, we built our boats, wrote our names on them and then each placed two people (Mr & Mrs Noah) as well as a pair of confectionary animals inside them.

Once ready we went to the bath to experience the flood…

And it was every bit as traumatic as the real thing! You see after launching the boats and letting them float for a bit, I thought it would be more realistic if I turned the tap on and simulated the water rising…

So I turned the cold tap on and within seconds several boats got sucked back into its surge. Capsizes were everywhere and most critically lollies sank to the bottom of the bath.

I began to hear crying.

I hadn’t counted on this.

It seemed like a great plan to me…

But I am not 5 years old.

Ellie was the one in tears and others were looking like they were about to follow. It was time to call a halt to the flood and rescue all that was in trouble.

Of course by now the ‘point’ of the exercise was completely lost as the kids scrambled to retrieve lost lollies and waterlogged boats.

As I put Ellie to bed she asked “Dad can we please not do a flood again. I was very sad about the lollies”