Meltdown!

Some things you have to learn the hard way.

So on a regular orphanage visit to Ulan we took melty-beads. If you don't know what these are, check them out, because they're fun. Anyway it basically entails small plastic squares, thousands of tiny beads, and an iron to melt them together. Hence being called melty-beads.

In any case, Ken, Kiikzhan, and I headed out to share this cool craft with Ulan kids in their free time. What we hadn't planned on was that it was a school holiday and instead of having the normal 10-20 kids, we were inundated and had up to 70 at one time! There wasn't room to walk and our supplies were definitely drained. I think a few beads were lost in the carpet but the other 4,999 were used!

Then...we realized a bigger problem. I had one iron and it took 3 minutes for each plastic craft. 1 iron, 3 minutes, 70 kids, and less than half an hour before we were to leave! Yea, we didn't do the math so well. We ended up extending our stay another 40 minutes and Kiikzhan and I fought to keep the children from sticking their fingers under the iron where they tried to take their still melting craft! In our last and absolutely final batch we had 7 crafts but 15 kids all claiming it was theirs! AGH! Definite meltdown!

But we kept our cool, figured out what belonged to who and headed home! That afternoon we were brave (foolish) enough to try again, this time armed with two irons! We ended up with only a small group of girls... Thank goodness!