Last Minute Packing and Lock Ins

 

    

    Friday was a whirlwind of a day. After school, my grandparents drove us to Sonic to get and end-of-the-week treat. Once we got home, I only had about 45 minutes before Hailey Armstrong and her mom had arrived already arrived to pick me up. I gathered my stuff hurriedly, some of the things including a fan, sleeping bag, camera (& polaroid), pillow, etc. Before it even seemed humanly possible, they were already in our driveway! I rushed out with my arms filled with supplies for the evening and morning. On the way to the school for the lock-in, I sat beside Hailey's youngest sister Abigail- she is THE CUTEST. She asked her mom if she could "have a Google" so she could look up pictures of Elsa. 

    The first priority was to sign is as soon as we got to the choir room. I sat my stuff down in the piano lab, signed my name on the clipboard, then wandered around talking to everyone. After a while, Mrs. Elliott gave me the job of collecting money for food and figuring out who had and who had not paid yet. I am not a big fan of handling other people's money, but I managed. (Get it? Because I am manager... sorry, I had to.) The majority of the choir had already made their way inside, so we were all set to eat. Our dinner was Jimmy John's sandwiches with a vast amount of desserts, chips, and drinks. We ate in the Lifetime Wellness classroom that was right across from the choir room. I was going to need all that sugar for the long (but fun) night we had ahead of us. The interesting part before we got down to business, though, was Weston brought unicycles and him and Coleton were riding them through the hallways; they even attempted to show Mrs. Elliott how to ride one! This is Coleton on a unicycle at some point during the lock-in in the picture underneath.

    The first rehearsal of the night was by far the most productive part of the lock-in. This rehearsal time was where we began to go over some of the pieces of music in detail, such as "Os Justi" and "Autumn". Tenors, altos, sopranos, and basses split up to work on their own sections, later rejoining to put the whole thing together. Although we did not cover all of the songs, there was definitely lots of progress made and I was impressed with what we accomplished! It felt so surreal to actually be experiencing the lock-in after so many years of just watching it on social media and seeing others post about it.

    Numerous games were played: team-building, corn hole, basketball, and whatever else you can imagine. The game that was the biggest hit was called "Electricity". I do not know how to explain it well enough to where anyone reading will understand, but I will try. You split up into two lines, every person holding hands with the person beside them. At the end of each line is a stuffed animal, and on the other side is one person with a coin (quarter) in hand. Every person will have their eyes closed except for the one who is at the beginning of the line. The designated coin-flipper will flip the coin, and if it lands on heads, the two people who start the lines have to squeeze the hand of the person next to them and get that squeeze to travel to the end of their line first. The last person must open their eyes as soon as they feel their hand get squeezed, and they want to grab the teddy bear before the other team does. The team that grabs the stuffed animal first rotates to the next person in their line; the goal is to get every player to have grabbed the stuffed animal in order to win. If someone grabs the stuffed animal when the coin lands on tails, though, that team has to go back a turn and put the person who was set to grab the bear before them back at the end of the line. It is actually not that confusing of a game, I promise. I really enjoyed it, but it was so intense! The sopranos lost the first round against the basses but won against the altos. I thought I would totally fail at the game, yet thankfully I did not!

    As we reached midnight, most everything started to wind down. Another rehearsal was in the mix somewhere, and the group started to set up to wind down for the night. There was an allotted amount of time before going to sleep that allowed individuals who wanted to could perform for everyone. Everything from Wicked's "Defying Gravity" to some jokingly belting "Sweatshirt" by Jacob Sartorius. It was very entertaining as well as inspiring to watch all my peers perform in front of me. You forget how talented some people are when you are with them all the time! Below was what the sleeping arrangement looked like in a nutshell.

    That mainly concluded the activities. The boys went to the room across the hall to "sleep", while we got to stay in the choir room. I laid out my very comfortable (not) sleeping bag from the dawn of time with my small Hufflepuff pillow. Hailey started out by reciting the first like 20 minutes of Finding Nemo from memory. The other girls had already started to fall asleep until eventually we were the only two up. The room was almost completely dark except for the red emergency lights in the ceiling and the light in one of the closets/rehearsal rooms. For about an hour we chatted and showed each other pictures of things on our phones, but we didn't last much longer after that. It was 4:00 and we had to wake up at 7:30. The most clear memory I have from that experience was while we were talking, someone else in the room started sleep-talking out of the blue and it scared the living daylights out of both of us. I am fairly sure I am scarred for life. Sleep was unpleasant and short. Have you ever tried sleeping on a tile floor, in a room with broken AC? We took this picture before heading off to sleep.

    Talk about not wanting to wake up in the morning, boy was I TIRED. Donuts, donuts, DONUTS, kept me awake enough to sing at the morning rehearsal. My voice was not in ideal shape after all the events of the previous night, so I had to drink a plentiful amount of water in hopes that it would survived until the end. To wrap up the lock-in, we sat in a circle and wrote nice, anonymous notes to each other. Every teen had a piece of paper with their name on it, and they would pass it to the person on the left. You had 30 seconds to write something, then pass it on. By the end  every page was covered with nice things! Here is mine: 

And that concludes my recollection of the lock in. It was lots of fun, and I am so blessed to manager for this awesome group of people. This year is going to be amazing, and I can not wait to see what the future holds for us!