It's OK To Not Like The 2 Year-Olds!

Hmmmmm, my great night last night turned out to not be such a great night. Is it bad if I want to quit working VBS after one night?

We had 8 kids, which is a lot compared to last year when we only had 3 or 4! Now don’t get me wrong, the VBS program at our church is huge (around 1,000 kids each year) !!! But for the ages that we teach, it’s only workers’ kids, so that’s why there aren’t a whole lot. Anyway, it was supposed to by my husband and myself, and one other helper. And our room has 2 year-olds and 3 year-olds. This year, we have about ½ 3’s and ½ 2’s. We go down to the “big church” as my daughter calls it (it’s the sanctuary) and our other helper shows up. She’s very outgoing, which is good, but throughout the night I realize how strange she really is. Anyway, the 2 year-olds are running around like crazy and we don’t really get to enjoy the opening things because we are chasing little kids the whole time.

The other thing that was really hard last night is noticing how many things were different from last year. I’m all about change, but I don’t see the need for change when things are going along perfectly fine, and the change doesn’t even improve anything. I talked to the “head’ lady, and she just kept giving me excuses about how this is her first year, she didn’t know what she was doing, blah-blah-blah. Why didn’t she pull together those of us that had done it before and get our opinions on things? It doesn’t really surprise me though because she has done the same thing with the entire nursery program on Sunday mornings as well.

The next issue I ran into was with our helper….she started asking me about diaper changes. Now in our nursery program, in the little baby rooms each baby is to have their diaper changed at least once. However, I think that stops once they are in the 1 ½ or 2 year-old rooms. So I told her we don’t change diapers…unless they complain or they stink! Basically we don’t go around checking for diapers to change. We are the potty training room, so normally most of our kids are either training or already potty trained. Anyway, our helper made a comment stating that she would change them. I told her to knock herself out. The fact is I hate changing diapers. If it’s not my child, I really don’t want to change anyone else’s diaper. That’s why I normally teach the older kids….the potty training kids on Sunday mornings don’t poop in their pull-ups!

Then it was time for the closing down in the “big church” again, so we headed down there. Absolute disaster! The little kids were running around from the get-go. So I took 2 of them back to the classroom, which really stunk because I missed the drama.

As I was sitting outside the room at the check-in/out table, I saw a bunch of teachers walk by with older VBS kids, and I remembered how many people always come up to us and say “wow, I don’t know how you guys deal with the little kids, I could never do that!” And suddenly it hit me….I’m allowed to not enjoy teaching the 2 year-olds. God gives each of us desires and talents, and I’m not a bad person for not liking to change diapers, and to like telling a Bible story to a group of kids that are actually listening. I’m not bad!

As silly as this revelation sounds, it was very liberating….I walked back into the classroom and played with my group of 3 year-olds that were calmly playing in the back while my husband played with the crazy 2 year-olds