PPP: Plants

Last night for mutual we had our Personal Progress Party with a plants theme, perfect for spring! Unfortunately, since school is getting busy, we only had 1 girl attend. We planned on planting some flowers at the house of an older sister as a service project (and surprise), but since we were small in numbers we just planted them around a tree at the church instead. And of course we had our regular Personal Progress update interview with the one YW who came. It was a pretty relaxing and fun night. Hopefully our flowers thrive!

P.P.P. - Pranks

Last night for mutual was our monthly personal progress party, and in honor of April Fool's Day, we decided to have a prank theme. And who better to prank than the young men! So while I was talking to the girls individually about their personal progress accomplishments, everyone else was emptying oreos of their delicious cream centers and replacing them with toothpaste. Our toothpaste was tinged slightly blue, so we decided to tell them they were the spring themed oreos. Then we just sat and waited, since they seem to have a 6th sense about us having treats in our room. We read lists of other pranks off the internet and talked about pranks we'd participated in in the past. It was a fun night. Our first victim was the YM president and he totally fell for it. We had one young man smell the mint and figure it out before he took a bite. Then everyone else fell for it also. It was a fun, harmless prank, as everyone was able to spit it out right away. I'm glad we were also able to talk to and motivate some of the girls to work on some personal progress goals.

PPP Party: Purple Pictionary

Last night for mutual we had our PPP party we had a purple theme and played pictionary. We all wore purple clothes, and our YW president also made us purple princess cupcakes (a la Sofia the First). We only had 2 girls there, so we had a group discussion about personal progress. We challenged them to finish Integrity #4 by Sunday. It is a pretty simple goal and went along with our purple theme. It was a fun night. 

Sorry for missing the last few weeks. I have been out of town and sick so I haven't been to mutual in a while. But we just had our first planning meeting of the year and we have some fun activities coming up! I'll try to be better from now on. 

PPP Party - Pumpkins

Last night for mutual we had our Personal Progress Party with a pumpkin theme for Halloween! The Young Men actually invited us to carve pumpkins with them tonight, and we gladly accepted. Everyone brought their own pumpkin (or we provided a few for some kids we knew couldn't afford it), we leaders provided carving tools and we let them loose.

For our personal progress portion of the night, I just pulled the YW out one by one and sat down with them for about 5 minutes to discuss how they are coming along with personal progress. We also did a little bit of planning for our upcoming Young Women in Excellence Night. We are hosting an Oscar themed night, inspired by this blog post, and I am really excited. So we asked each girl to begin thinking about what value she would like to speak about and to think of a woman in the ward who emulates that value. Some girls knew right a way, and some need extra time to think it over. It should be a great night.
 
Our pumpkin carving went a little over time because we have some pretty creative youth in our ward.

Yes, there was a lot of pretend stabbing going on. It could not be avoided.

It was a great night that helped our YM and YW bond. 

PPP Party: Patriotic

Last night for mutual it was the first Tuesday of the month, so we had our PPP party, this month with a patriotic theme for the 4th of July. We brought red, white and blue nail polish and let the girls paint their nails. We also used metallic sharpie markers to draw designs on our painted nails.

We played a round of Patriotic bingo, found here. We forgot to print the state cards, so we had to come up with all 50 states to write down and cut up before we played. We used M&M's as our pieces and snacked on those all night.

We also printed out these Patriotic conversation starters just for fun.

We also made these red, white and blue drinks. We're not big fans of pina colada flavor, so we used a white powerade drink instead that worked fine. Everyone was very impressed, even thought we only had small cups to make these in.

Since I'm over personal progress in our ward, I sat down with each girl individually and talked about how their goals are going. We are still working on our Book of Mormon Challenge. We are all still in 1st Nephi, so we haven't earned any rewards yet unfortunately. 

At the end of the night we went outside and played with those little poppers to get even more in the 4th of July mood. It was a great night and everyone had fun. 

PPP Party: Profiles

Every first Tuesday of the month we have a Personal Progress Program (PPP) Party, and we try to incorporate a fun P theme to go along with it. This month we chose profiles, with this as our inspiration: 

 http://middlechildcomplex.tumblr.com/post/2389902442

Instead of the church in the background, we are going to put pictures of the temple behind the profile of each girl. 

During each PPP Party, we take the girls aside and ask them for an update on their personal progress. It's good too take notes during these little meetings so that you can follow up with the girls next month and see how their goals went. We encourage the girls to set a new goal for the month or to continue whatever goal they are currently working on, and try to assist them in any way. This is also a great time to sign off on any goals the girls have finished.

For this activity, we also wanted the girls to work on and finish Individual Worth #7, so we took each girl's journal and wrote down some of the gifts that the Lord has given her. Each girl will then also need to have a friend and a family member do the same. Then she can compile her list of gifts and make a plan on how to improve and use these gifts. 

We wanted to redecorate our old outdated (think pale pink and tulle everywhere) young women's room. So after we finished tracing our profiles, which will be part of the new wall art, we took down all the ugly old pink and started putting up the new decorations.

The mutual theme this year is "Wherefore, stand ye in holy places, and be not moved, until the day of the Lord come; for behold, it cometh quickly, saith the Lord. Amen." (Doctrine and Covenants 87:8). Our YW class has taken on the symbol of a tree to remind us of this theme. We found this great tree that sticks right on the wall to add to our decorations. We covered the bulletin boards in contact paper. I'll try to get more pictures of the completed room on Sunday. 

Since we had some extra time before we started decorating, we all sat together as a group and read the first chapter of 1st Nephi to get us started on our Book of Mormon Challenge from Sunday. 

I also meant to bring my laptop so that the girls could work on their indexing goal also, but I forgot it at home. Hopefully I will remember next time.