The Fabulous Feminine Flamingos

         Our students planned this event all on their own, so I asked one of them to write about it.  
        Lexi Miller, aspiring missionary, teacher, photographer and writer penned this one.  Enjoy!

      For a school student, the months of January, February, and March can feel draggy and a bit boring at times.  As a student in high school, I can identify with this feeling as well!  However, we, the junior high and high school girls of Lott Mennonite School, seem to always be full of ideas, some a bit crazy at times as our latest idea turned out to be.  

                                                 

         Back in October, we began to talk about how it would be fun to throw a pizza party for the entire school.  But with Thanksgiving break, the Christmas program, and then Christmas vacation going on, that idea got put on the back burner and forgotten about for a while.  In January, once we had been back in school for a couple weeks, we pulled the idea back out and got serious about it.  We spent our lunch breaks planning and putting all our ideas together.  Since we had been planning so many other parties earlier in the school year, we decided that it was time to invent a name for our group.  With some inspiration from Mr. Swanson, we finally produced the name "The Fabulous Feminine Flamingos." So it was decided that our theme was to be flamingos and Hawaiian.  We also thought that it would be fun to dress up a little. All the "flamingos" were instructed to wear either yellow, pink, or orange dresses on the day of the pizza party.  We wore aprons, flowers in our hair, and name tags with "Fabulous Feminine Flamingos" written on it. 

   Those of us who are in Literature class realized that we had used alliteration in our group name and were thrilled that we had tied in something from our lessons with our pizza party. 

     Miss Delores, our first and second grade teacher, took us shopping one day after school about a week and a half before the party.  We knew that we were going to make homemade pizza crusts, but we still needed decorations, toppings for the pizzas, and ice cream for desert.  At Hobby Lobby we had the most interesting experience.  When we walked up to pay, we discovered that the lady in front of us had already paid for our item.  We were surprised and felt so blessed!  We topped off the evening with supper at Rosa's Cafe and frozen yogurt at U-Swirl.  

          When January 30th, the day of our pizza party finally rolled around, we were filled with excitement.  It also happened that it was the day of night school.  We knew that we would be exhausted by the time the day was over because school was to last from 8:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.  Miss Delores took the "Fabulous Feminine Flamingos" to school early so that we could start rolling out pizza dough and putting the pizzas together.  We had decided that our moms would not have to help us with any of the food, so some of us made pizza crusts for the very first time!  The plan was to make fourteen pizzas, and we thought that we had calculated the right amount of dough.  But to our surprise, we ended up with seventeen pizzas, and may I also remind you that our school has only thirty-three students.  

     We had permission from Mr. Swanson to skip devotions so we could set up and continue making pizzas.  Earlier in the week, we had asked three of the ladies from church who live close to the school if we could use their ovens to bake our pizzas.  When break arrived at 10:15, we loaded up the big van with pizzas. Mrs. Swanson then kindly drove us high school girls to the ladies' houses to bake our pizzas.  While waiting on the pizzas to bake, we stayed at the ladies' houses and worked on our school lessons. 

 

    Lunch seemed to come all too soon and there was a last minute scramble to get everything in place.  We felt extremely blessed when our fellow classmates sang the "Thank-You song" for us. It was also a great feeling to see all of them so excited and thankful.  

 

A Hawaiian-themed cookie with flamingos

An excited second grade student

Lastly, the "flamingos", as we like to call ourselves, wanted to pose for a picture with all our pizzas.

   The day was filled with many laughs and many unforgettable moments.  Working together with all my wonderful friends was such a blessing.  They are great people to work with and that was one of the best parts for me.  These are the kinds of memories we will treasure for the rest of our lives.