Religious Exploration

“May, queen of blossoms, and fulfilling flowers! What pretty music shall we charm the hours?” – Lord Edward Thurlow

Greetings, Families!

Please grab your calendars and read carefully all that is below. This month’s newsletter is ripe with date changes, summer event previews, and more!

UPCOMING EVENTS:

5/3 Family Breakfast @ 8:45 (register HERE and bring a dish if you are able)

5/14 Parent Connection Dinner @ 6:30 (register HERE one time, to get reminders) BRING YOUR OWN DISHES!

5/17 Annual Meeting (childcare is provided!) @ noon

5/24 Parent Q&A with Skyla on Playground deck @ 11:45

PLAN AHEAD

6/7 River of Life RE Service

More information about our events can be found below, and info for all events can be found at uucorvallis.org by clicking “News” in the menu bar and then selecting “RE Council” from the drop-down menu.

If you love Family Breakfast — and we know you do — take special note: May’s breakfast is happening one week early so we don’t overlap with Mother’s Day.

If the mother in your household dreams of nothing more than sleeping in on her special day but simply cannot bear the thought of missing monthly breakfast, please consider this our humble gift to you.

May Family Breakfast will be Sunday, May 4. We hope to see you there!

Summer Sundays are made for lingering. A post-service hike, a splash in the river, a snack shared with friends while the kids run ahead.

While Parent Connection Dinner and Family Breakfast take their annual break from June through September, we’ll be leaning into a few casual, low-prep ways to stay connected this summer:

June 28 – Fitton Green Hike & Snack
July 26 – Marys River Natural Area Splash & Chat
August 29 – Family BBQ & RE Orientation (this one is a Saturday!)

Each month’s RE newsletter will include registration details and gathering information. If we need to cancel due to extreme heat or low registration, I’ll contact registered families by text.

I’m especially excited for the August BBQ, because it will serve as our joyful on-ramp into the new church year. We are planning to lean hard into family fun, stronger connections, and fuller attendance in the year ahead, and this gathering will be our first step.

We’ll eat together, play lawn games, and welcome both new and returning families. Children who register early will receive their RE t-shirts as we unveil this year’s theme. Then, as the kids head off with their guides and advisors to play games and create their group covenants, parents and I will spend some time talking about our shared hopes for Religious Exploration, and about how we can partner with you to make Fellowship Sundays a place your child is genuinely excited to be.

Please get these dates on your calendar now, and let me know if any of them land squarely on family vacation plans. If a large portion of families are excluded and there’s a better option available, I am more than willing to shuffle things around. The earlier we compare calendars, the easier it is to make summer work for everyone.

Speaking of communicating your needs with me, I’m delighted to invite you to our annual Parents’ Chat with the DRE.

This is a casual chance to share your questions, your calendar conflicts, your hopes, your frustrations, and your wildest ideas for how we can get you and your children genuinely engaged in UU faith formation. If there’s something you’ve been wanting me to know, this is a great space for it.

Join me on May 24 at 11:45 a.m. on the RE deck. I’ll have pitchers of lemonade, the kids can play on the playground, and we can chat in the sunshine.

What you share in this conversation really does shape the plans we make over the summer as we prepare for fall, so I hope you’ll come help me dream a little.

Thank you to everyone who came out for the JETPIG Easter Egg Hunt last month! The feedback was fabulous. Our big kids were wonderfully caring with the littles, and our volunteers kept their cool under some very real crowd pressure at the slime and candy tables.

I especially want to share one story that came out of our volunteer debrief.

When I asked one volunteer how the event had gone, they told me they had spent part of the night before studying the value assigned to their station so they would be ready to talk about it from every angle and ready to help children think a little more deeply instead of simply grabbing the prize and sprinting off to the next table.

They were positively beaming as they said, “I learned so much just preparing for this, and then it really paid off. I had the best conversations with some of the kids.”

As they shared a few of those exchanges with me, I realized I could hardly track the details because I was too busy feeling so stinking proud to serve alongside adults who take the faith formation of our children this seriously.

Y’all, we are beyond lucky to have the volunteer team we do. Your children are in excellent hands with these remarkable leaders who prepare on their own time so they can engage more meaningfully, and who genuinely delight in watching children light up with excitement about what they are learning. Gah! What could be better than that?

Thank you, as always, for entrusting your children to the care of the Religious Exploration team. It is such a joy and an honor to watch them grow, to see their personalities branch out in all directions, becoming more fully themselves year by year. What a gift it is to be humans in community together.

I’m wishing you blossoming love, deeper connection, and a few good pockets of springtime ease this month. And as always, if you need to chat, I am only an email or phone call away.