Psalm 145:7
“everyone will share the story of Your wonderful goodness, they will sing with joy about Your righteousness.”
Last week was my week at home. After months that seemed like years I was finally at Camp! I was all geared up and ready to begin my seventh year counseling Girls Camp. This year the theme was “The Story”, each day we added another chapter to the story God had written in His word, and learned how to apply it to the stories He is writing for us.
Ok, ready for this? This is another one of those annoying posts when I’m all over the place and put in way more detail than I’m sure you care to sift through. But, if you know me at all, you know what to do (if not, please reacquaint yourself with the disclaimer in the “this is me” column to the right :-)
Cabin: Moose Lodge This year I was co-counseling in Moose Lodge, which was one of the older cabins. I’m always a little apprehensive to be in this cabin, since the girls are older a lot of times I find it harder to reach out to them because they are with their friends all week, or they “know everything” already, or simply, they can act much more mature than me (sad, but true). But I was so blessed with this gaggle of girls! They were each so sweet and fun, and we had many a laugh.
My co-counselor was Sarah, coincidentally, when I was nine years old, and attending camp for the very first time, Sarah was my counselor! I was very bad that year, as were my friends, and we nearly drove Sarah insane (something I didn’t know till years later, I always remembered Sarah as one of my favorite counselors, and she has always been one of the counselors I try to imitate in my own counseling career!) so, it was very exciting to be counseling with her this year, and we had many stories to share with our girls of that terrible first year of camp :-)
Activity: Jump Ropes Of course, what else? I think this was my fourth year working with the jump ropes, but this was my first year teaching it alone! I had helpers of course; basically I just needed someone with arms to swing the ropes. We had a great couple of classes (morning and afternoon). Our day would begin with stretches, which I quickly designated the responsibility over to Brittany, who helped me in the afternoon class. She was able to bring the energy required and make the stretches unique and fun. Then we would do our “endurances”, the girls would skip for two minutes to see how many jumps they could get, then we would do our “no skips” when the girls would see how many jumps they could get without tripping on their ropes. We kept track of each day to see how they improved.
Next we would move on and do a little bit with the single ropes, but the girls (and I) were anxious to get to the fun stuff: long rope, double dutch, egg beater, etc.
We had a rule on the jump rope court: the word “cant” was not allowed. The first day I wrote the word “cant” on the concreat and told them that if they said that word, I would banish them off the court, because I would hear none of it, and if they did use that word, they had to add two o’s to the end, I would write two o’s to the end of the word “cant” making it become “can too”. During the week, whenever a girl let “I cant do it” slip out, I would say “what was that you said?” and her eyes would get big and she’d say “I can too! Can too! Can too!” and they were extra watchful for when I would utter the forbidden word: “I can’t jump more then one jump in double dutch myself…” “You said cant! You said cant!” “Ok, I mean, it’s very hard for me, since I don’t have much practice.” :-)
We also had a tradition of saying hi to any staff member that passed. Since the court where we jumped was situated just between the kitchen, the staff dorms and the road, we could keep ourselves quite busy saying hello. Whenever we say a staff member passing by, we’d say “ok, lets say hi to Cora. One, two, three, HI CORA!” I did that because I wanted the girls to be familiar with who the staff is, and I think it worked :-)
Chapel:
Oooh chapel. Jon and Andrea are the couple who both lead the worship as well as do the teaching, and they are pretty much wonderful. Each service we began with counting down the minutes to start, followed by a morning stretch, and then the youtube dance “Double Dream Hands” (which was followed by the sequel “Double Dream Feet” later on in the week. Then we’d have an appearance of Andy Lovehandles (which was Jon dressed up) and a short game show segment where the girls answered ridiculous questions about celebrities. Then we’d get into our songs, which included everything from the beloved Boogaloo, to worship hymns, followed by a recitation of the Shma, then the teaching. As I said, the theme was “The Story”, and Jon and Andrea took us through an exciting and insightful journey starting from creation and ending with Jesus. So many times I found myself frantically scribbling notes, not so I could strike up conversation with the girls during devos, but because I was so impacted by the teaching!
Theme Dinners:
And of course, what's Girls Camp without your themed dinners?? This year we had our fill.
Pick Yer Color night was a monochromatic theme, everyone was to try to dress (as much as she could) in a single color. I was blue (because I was easy) and we even got our girls to line up in rainbow order for dinner (with me and Sarah in our proper places as well!)
There was also Stadium Night. The girls were to dress in sports jerseys or team spirit garb. Not being much of a sports fan, I wore my team shirt from Varsity camp (Go Hulk!) but I was sporting a rockin’ sweat band I’d found in the Pine Post! The staff was amazing this night! Walking around with cardboard vendor boxes slung around their necks calling “hot dogs, geeet your hot dogs!”
Crazy Hair Night!! My favorite! When I was born, God know that I would one day be a counselor, and He gave me the wonderful gift of built in, natural crazy hair! Shortly before dinner, I did something I only do about once a year, and that’s to brush my hair. And it got BIG! Some days I have a hard time dealing with my hair, but on crazy hair night, I’m in love with it! All the girls got into the night as well, you’ve never seen so many crooked pony tails, multicolored heads, or gelled up spikes!
Characters Welcome Dinner. Since the theme was “The Story”, the final dinner was character themed. The girls were to dress up as their favorite book, movie or video game character. I was SO excited, a few weeks before camp I found a bolt of fabric at JoAnnes, one of those ready made skirts where you just add the seam. And it was Fancy Nancy! My number one all time favorite children's book character and my hero! So I was all set to dress like her, with the skirt, some sequencey sparkly bows, a feather boa, and a shirt I had ironed on a bunch of jewels. Then, the night before we left I remembered, I was flying home early to attend a friends wedding, and would be in the air during the dinner!!! I was devastated! But I decided, whatever, I could still be Fancy Nancy, so on Friday morning I went to breakfast, feather boa and sparkly bows and all! And I wore my skirt all day, even during jump ropes! I was sad to miss the dinner though; I was excited to see all the characters. But my sister assured me that she’d gotten many pictures, so I can’t wait to see them!
This And That’s:
Ok, here’s the fun part, all the random little stories that may or may not make sense. Just the snippets of the week that make me smile :-)
The first day was the swim test. Last year I had swum out to the raft and hung out there to encourage the girls as the treaded water. This year I decided to do the same (despite the cold, coldness) I swam out with the first group, feigning indifference to the cold. I let the girls swim ahead of me a little bit, so that they wouldn't see me walk till the water reached my nose, then doggy paddle or swim on my back the rest of the way to the raft. Upon reaching the raft I climbed up and joined Matt and Tyler, the lifeguard and AO on duty, and chatted with the girls during the five minutes of treading. I hung out there as the first group swam away and watched and helped direct the second group swim in and around the raft. If any girls didn’t make it to the raft and had to be towed in by a lifeguard, I chatted with them while we waited for them to be picked up by the p-boat and brought back to shore. With every other group I’d swim back to the yellow area, then swim back out to the raft again with the next group. I think I ended up swimming out with about seven groups or so, which means I swam the distance between the raft and the yellow area about fourteen times. Meaning I had probably swam the equality of the length of the lake! (though of course, I would die if I actually tried, since I wouldn't have ten minute breaks in between!) and I think I more then earned my blue swim band (well, since I doggy paddled/back swam and didn’t tread, maybe not :-) but it was a good exercise, and I love doing that, since I know many of the girls already, I was able to give a name to the lifeguards when they were asking the girls if they were doing ok or needed help, and I was also able to get to know the girls I didn’t already know, especially when they would wait on the raft if they didn’t make it.
The second to last group to go held a few of my girls who’d made me promise to swim out with them for moral support. They weren’t too sure about the cold water, but I told them that we were arctic explorers, swimming out to explore this chunk of ice and observe the penguins! The deal was, the girls would swim out to the “ice” (the raft) and I would explore the ice for five minutes while they observed (aka, treaded water) then we would swim back. So we got out there, and I climbed up and told Matt and Tyler that we were arctic explorers here to observe the penguins, to which Matt informed me that “there are no penguins in the arctic, but there are polar bears.” “Ok”, I said, “then can you be polar bears?” “Sure,” he said. Then thought for a minute… “Wait - we’re the polar bears!?!” needless to say, the polar bears weren’t very active that day.
On the day of the swim test, I promised two of my girls that if they got blue bands, then I would attempt to take them out sailing. They did it! (though I had to heavily encourage one to keep on treading :-) so on Monday we bathing suited up, joined by another of my girls and Brittany, and we headed down to the beach, stood in line waiting for the lifeguards to start letting us peg in, got all our equipment (life jackets, rudders, center boards, kayak paddle for Amy) and headed into the water where we stood for about a half hour while I tried to figure out / remember how to set up first one sail boat then the other. FINALLY I had both boats set up, and was just untying them from the buoy’s ready to set sail, when Sarah came running up. “Are you coming or going!?” she asked, “we’re just not going” I told her. “well come back in, we have zip line today, I just found out and we only have ten minutes to get out there!” so, what took a half hour to set up, I pulled back down in five. We rushed out to the zip line with as many girls as we could find (we missed one :-( with plans of returning to the sails the next day. Of course the following day ended out sweltering hot phase and in swept the cold! We never did get back out, sadly.
On one of the days when it was still VERY hot, we were trying to encourage the girls to drink more water and stay hydrated. The girls at my table were chugging the pitcher of water, and somehow we began trying to drink more and more. At one point, Cora passed by and told us that at JV the week before; she had refilled a boy’s cabins water pitcher five times. The competition was on…and we were going for SIX! We drove Shelby (our server that day) crazy! She started bringing us out two pitchers at a time, and we were chugging as much as we could. At the end of the meal we finally sipped the last of our sixth pitcher. That equals a full pitcher per person at the table. We congratulated each other, thanked Shelby…then headed for the bathroom.
Wednesday was supposed to be our day out. We were supposed to go to Au Train Beach, but due to the appearance of bad weather, it was decided that we would stay on home base and carry on as usual. But we still wanted to do something fun for dinner, so the staff quickly pulled out the cardboard cut outs of jungle animals used for the African safari at Family Camp last summer, and quickly transformed the Bear Trail into a jungle. Shortly before dinner was to start, I found Sarah sitting on a picnic table chatting with some of our girls. I’m not sure how it happened, but somehow we both started talking about the safari that was to come, only we were talking about the Malibu safari, and how we had to put on our hiking stilettos, and how we didn’t want to chip a nail. All with bratty, valley girl accents. This continued the rest of the night, we talked about how we were hoping to catch a pink alligator so we could have a pink alligator bag, and how we needed our sparkling mineral water, and (best of all!) the new diet we were trying: we weren’t vegetarians, we just couldn’t eat anything with a face, so we only ate fish (which of course don’t have faces) and Amish Faceless chicken. I think we got on the nerves of the staff juuust a little bit, but the girls seemed to love it :-) we finally put a stop to it when we pretended to leave and then acted like we had no clue what the girls were talking about :-)
Waking up campers is my morning coffee, it makes me energized and happy in the morning. Waking up the girls has always been one of my favorite things to do as a counselor (much of which I’d learned from Sarah my first year). since I am not a morning person, I find a sense of sweet revenge on my former counselors (ahem, Sarah) by waking up my own girls in the most obnoxious ways possible. However, due to the fact that my girls were older, they always requested that we wake them up at seven when we headed out to our counselor meeting, meaning that by the time we got back at eight (the normal time to wake up the campers) everyone was wide awake, showered, and ready for food. Tears! However, one day Sarah and I were late for the meeting (thanks to a rogue alarm clock situation) so we didn’t have a chance to wake the girls up before the meeting, which meant (mwahaha) they were all mine! (Sarah saved them for me, knowing I would enjoy the experience).
After the meeting I raced back to the cabin, and tip-toed into the counselors room, hooked my ipod up to my speakers, did a quick song search, turned up the volume and headed to the bunks of blissfully snoozing campers. I began blasting “Hello Sunshine” by BarlowGirl, singing along and too-happily announcing that it was morning! I went from bunk to bunk, rousing the girls and being just obnoxious. Most started to stir by the time I’d turned on the second morning song, “Sunshine Girl” (Britt Nicole) and I got many an evil glair as I shouted at the top of my lungs the line, “I CAN BE THE QUIET ONE!!” then whispered “or the life of the party.” But then, that wasn’t working for a few in the back room, so I decided desperate times called for desperate measures. So I left the room so I could scroll through my songs till I found the one I was looking for. Ah, there it was, I knew I’d struck gold. I clicked play, let the first notes ring through the cabin: “oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-whoa-whoa” then: “I know ya love me, I know ya care, just shout whenever, and I’ll be there. you want my love, you want my heart, and we will never, ever, ever be apart…” and before the Bieb’s could croon the words “baby, baby, baby oooooh!” the snoozing girls were out of their beds and across the cabin, begging me on their knees to turn it off! I had found my weapon.
The next morning, before doing anything else, I snuck up to Alex’s bunk (for she had been the loudest about her dislike for my morning tactics) I held my speakers to her unsuspecting ear, and clicked play. Justin Bieber is a wonderful alarm clock.
The girls later came to me with verses about joy and laughter saying they had found them for me, since I was so joyful to wake them up in the morning. (wasn’t quite sure how to take that).
The last day, I decided to get up at six to see the sunrise (my camp tradition). After my alarm went off I was laying in bed for just a minute before pulling myself out, when I heard an alarm go off somewhere else in the cabin. I thought it was odd, but it was soon turned off, so I didn’t give it a second thought, and I tip-toed out of the cabin.
Later that morning however, I was swarmed by the whole cabin, they were asking why I had to go and get up so early on my last morning! Turns out they’d had it all planed out to wake up at six, plug my speakers into Alyssa’s ipod, and wake me up to Taylor Swift in my ear! I’m almost sorry I missed it…almost.
Later that day, two of my girls got packages. The camp tradition is to sing for your package (a rule that’s become optional at Girls Camp). These girls were adamant they were not going to sing, but I convinced them, promising to sing with them. We got up in front of the dinning hall, and Alyssa invited everyone to sing along “since I’m sure you know the words.” And I announced that this was a song dedicated to “Moose Mornings.” And we launched into the chorus of “Baby”. Surprisingly we weren’t booed off, though I think the fact that the staff guys started singing along as the rattled the silverware baskets may have helped.
It was a wonderful week full of blessings, memories and adventures. I loved my girls, whether they were in my cabin or not, and God worked in my own life through them and others at the camp in so many ways that I cant even explain or hope to make sense of. So many of our devos I felt as if the girls were teaching me way more than I could hope to teach them, and they reminded me that the faith of a child is a beautiful thing, and how much I long to have that simple, innocent and lovely faith. The fire they had in their hearts to tell their friends and family the story of God was so inspiring and encouraging, they didn’t let fear get in the way, but were just hungry to know more. And as much as I can love on those girls every day, they turn around and love on me with such an unselfish, unjudged love. They teach me more then I’ll ever even know, and I’m thankful for every moment God gives me with them.
