I. LOVE. MY. CHURCH. Yes, I do! I will say it again and again. They work SO HARD to make church GREAT for the entire family. The adult service is top notch, but where they EXCEL is in their programming for children.

We are blessed to have a once a month program called KidStuf, where kids take their parents to church. It’s the first Sunday of the month and parents are introduced to what their kids are learning through an exciting and interactive family experience. One of the best parts of KidStuf is our Take-Out. Each month, we receive something to encourage us to spend time together as a family. It might be a game. It might be a family night plan. In December, it was a shoebox to fill for Operation Christmas Child.

Whatever the Take-Out is, it’s always a fun and interactive way for our family to create discussion around the monthly Big Idea. That’s what I love about it the most. It facilitates AMAZING conversation with the Princess, and she ALWAYS wants to do it.

This month’s Take-Out was “Foto Finish.” We competed as a family against other families around the metro-Atlanta area in a “Cooperation” (Cooperation is this month’s big idea) challenge. It was HYSTERICAL! The KidStuf website was set up to log in a certain time and register your family. It then gave us a series of challenges to complete and kept track of the time it took us to perform them by having us click when we finished each challenge. There were also trivia questions that we had to answer correctly or time was added on.

Our family was laughing before we even began. We played for 30 minutes on the photo booth of my computer just trying to get the “perfect” family shot (see above). Here were some of the rejects…

I had to run to the restroom, and the Princess and My Sweetie kept playing. I LOVE this one….

Once we FINALLY logged on, uploaded our picture and began, our first challenge was to put on 16 layers of clothing EACH! And, each person had to have one thing from each of the other family members. I was laughing so hard as I piled shirts and pajama pants on the Princess. Our final outfits…

I told you… It was HYSTERICAL..

We then had to do an obstacle course with the kitchen chairs and spoons and balls all the while peeling off layers of clothes because we were burning up. My Sweetie took one for the team when he drank a blended concoction of milk, water, chocolate syrup and celery.

What a trooper!! We also had to make a structure out of toothpicks and marshmallows. The Princess and I made the bottom while My Sweetie worked on the top. Then we “Cooperated” (that would be the Big Idea this month) and put them together. What a masterpiece.

The final challenge of the night was to clean up the mess we made. Yes, they made that part of the competition. You couldn’t click “done” until everything was the way it was when we started. (Pretty smart on that one. I was VERY thankful for it.)

We finished the competition at #53 out of over 100 families. We were pretty proud of that. However, where we landed in the competition didn’t really matter. What mattered was how much fun we had together while “Cooperating” (Big Idea again there) as a family.

We LOVED it!

Oh, and rumor has it, they’re going to run the competition again this coming Monday at 7pm at Kidstuf.com. Just sayin’.

Linked to Things I Love Thursday.