New Beginnings 2008

These pictures do not do justice to how good the room looked all decorated for our New Beginnings program we held on Tuesday night.
The theme for the evening was "Becoming a STAR" (STAR = standing for truth and righteousness). The rest of this post is from my journal entry the other night.

The New Beginnings program went very well. First, the room looked great. We used the Primary room and I wanted it to be more than “just” the primary room. Luckily my sister in law Cammy had her New Beginnings a few weeks ago and they had decorated extensively and their stuff coordinated very nicely with my theme. She let me borrow their stuff and it spruced up the room so much. We covered the tables in dark navy blue table cloths and two tables, in each corner, were just accent tables that we put center pieces on. The main table up front displayed the small star boxes that I had made for each of the girls. The theme for the night was “Becoming a STAR”, based on this year’s mutual theme, “Be steadfast and immovable always abounding in good works”. The desert table was very lovely. I borrowed some nice serving trays and a beautiful punch bowl from Aunt Joan, she has a lot of fun serving stuff, she loves to serve with flair. Each of the deserts were star shaped - 3 different cookies, I made sugar cookies, Amanda made peanut butter cookies with chocolate kisses on top, and Rebecca made cake cookies.
The best part of the night was the skit. I was nervous about it. It wasn’t a true skit, each of the girls had a part - but it wasn’t interactive with each other. They each had a part, 7 of them had one of the values to share a thought about and the others had a line from the Young Women theme to share a thought about. They each had to come up with their own words. I gave them a sentence, “share an experience about....” and they had to come up with it on their own. I was nervous as to how it would come out because we hadn’t rehearsed anything and I didn’t even really explain when or how they would share their part until the time of the skit. However, it couldn’t have been more beautiful. Each of the girls did an excellent job and I felt the spirit so strongly. The format of the skit was the older girls sharing about personal progress to the new Beehives. We had the new Beehives sit on the front row and as each girl came to do their part they stood in front of the Beehives and directed their comments to them. I was just in awe how wonderful it turned out. It was definately an inspired idea. The idea came together piece by piece - I knew I wanted to do a skit and have it set up the way we did it, but I had no idea what exactly to have the girls say, and I sat down a couple of times to try and “write” the skit, but nothing came. Finally Saturday night I knew I was out of time and needed to get something together so I could give it to the girls at church. I pulled out my Personal Progress book to get some ideas and inspiration, and I received some. I just typed out the scripture and quote from each of the first pages of each value, and then based my “share and experience” based on one of the value experiences of each value. It was very simple, not complicated, nothing fancy and left the majority of it up to the girls. They came through very nicely and it was a lovely program.
The program was exactly what I hoped for when I set my goals of what the night should be - Meaningful and Memorable and for me it hit on both of those. I think I will always remember this night and how well everything turned out and the beautiful spirit I felt - the love and peace and warmth that I felt was very refreshing and truly made it worth all the effort I put into planning and preparing this event.