Back in April our Youth Pastor moved to California to work at another church. When the kids came home from youth group and said that he was leaving I turned and looked right at Michael and said..."I guess we're gonna be leading youth group!" There wasn't any hesitation at all. I was not going to leave all these student with no place to come during the week to fellowship and grow in their faith. Thankfully Pastor Tim wasn't going to leave them hanging either so he stepped up to be the fill in Youth Pastor so Michael and I have just been Youth Leaders.
I knew pretty early on that I would be going to summer camp with the youth since I was the only option for a girl leader. I also knew that Ella would not be happy about that and I was correct. She was not happy us being youth leaders or me going to summer camp. I told her right off the bat I would try to ignore her at youth group and pretend that she wasn't my daughter in hopes that it wouldn't bug her so much that I was there on Wednesday nights.
By the time camp rolled around at the end of July she didn't seem too upset about me going anymore and she also didn't seem to care that I was there at youth group on Wednesday nights.
Our group met at church on Monday, July 28th. We were driving two vehicles. Pastor was driving the church van and I was driving my van. Pastor also rented a U-Haul trailer to store all the luggage since the 15 passenger van does not have any sort of storage area. In all we had 2 leaders and 19 youth going.
We drove over to the peninsula and it took us just a little more than 2 hours. The drive was actually really nice. Daniel, who's in the brown coat, sat in the front seat of my van and we had some great talks on the way over.
We actually got there a bit early so we couldn't check in yet. So we unloaded our luggage into piles and then just waited to be assigned to our cabin / dorm room. One of the reasons it took them a bit to give us our room information at least for us girls was because they had us down as having less girls so we weren't all going to fit into one room and since I was the only girl leader that wasn't going to work. They moved things around and instead of us being on the first floor of Town Square (that's what they call the girls dorm building) they moved us up to the 2nd floor.
The guys were staying in either cabin 6 or 7...Jack and Zeke can't agree on the number. The boys cabins were just behind Town Square building. They had all sorts of fun things for campers to do while we waited for everyone to arrive. In all there were 5 churches coming together for camp. This inflatable was super fun and tricky...sadly, but not surprisingly it didn't last long and got popped pretty quickly.
Us girls had fun playing Tetris Tumble.
Our dorm room had a door that led directly outside to a deck area that also had stairs to get down from. It made is SO incredibly nice and quick for us to get outside instead of going through the building and down the stairs. We also had this great view overlooking the whole free time area. From this view you could see the basketball court, skate area, gaga ball pit, volleyball court, 9 square in the air and then all the lawn games. You could also see the flatten inflatable.
We found out later that our room was the only one that had nice flooring. The rest of the rooms had the same material the bunks were made out of as the flooring. We also had a private water closet and a sink outside the water closet. The funny thing is the sink didn't have a mirror over it. Thankfully Aidry brought a make up mirror about the size of a Bible.
For lunch they had Costco pizza and salad.
Our church's color was yellow. I took my kids to Walmart to see if we could find any yellow colored clothes to wear during the week. Yellow is hard color to find! Jack, Ella and I did end up getting construction yellow sweatshirts from the men's work section. Zeke found a yellow hoodie and a Pokémon shirt. I wasn't sure what the other kids would do so I went ahead and bought a 32 pack of yellow bandanas from Amazon. These we so fun and I was really surprised how much each of the kids wore them throughout the week. Even though yellow is not my favorite color at all it was a great color for camp. It was always easy to spot our group from far away and we were really easy to spot in all the video footage they showed each day.
Our first team activity happened after lunch around the basketball court.
I had given out the bandanas so the kids were busy figuring out how they wanted to wear them. They were quite creative in how they used them.
It took a while for everyone to get organized so we were waiting for a bit.
One of my goals during camp was to take a bunch of pictures and also to get an individual selfie or as least a small group selfie with every one of our campers.
The kids had fun just hanging out entertaining themselves.
People gathered in color groups around the court.
Listening to the instructions.
The fun part about being a leader was having the inside scoop about what was happening since I had attended the Zoom meetings with the other church leaders.
For this first team competition we had to pick one person from our team to run into the center of the basketball court and retrieve a wrapped package. Of course all the other teams would be sending their designated person at the same time as well. Inside the wrapped packages were inflatable mascot costumes that would become our team mascot for the week. I had told Pastor about it since he wasn't able to attend the meeting. I was so excited about this part because I knew it was going to be hilarious and I had hoped so badly that we would get a unicorn costume.
I was so excited we actually got the unicorn costume. Josiah is in the costume so I ended up wearing his hat.
The team competition included putting on the mascot costume, creating a team name, decorating a flag with that team name and then coming up with a team chant.
Our team name was the The Amazing Blazing Unicorns. We chose that because the theme of the camp was Blaze.
It was fun that the competition was multi-layered since it really taped into different creativity areas.
Our chant was..."We Amaze, We Blaze...We're the Amazing Blazing Unicorns."
After all the teams got into their costumes they had a race with all the mascots. Josiah ended getting way to hot so Jack took over the mascot duties for the race.
The race was hilarious! One of the mascot costumes wasn't able to inflate and then the chipmuck totally took out the chicken.
During the week there were all sorts of ways to earn points for your team. One of them was memorizing Scripture. That was always my favorite thing to do at camp so I knew I was going to help get points that way. The girls all decided they wanted to do that as well so we had some downtime in our room memorizing Scripture.
Jazzy & her cousin's Trina & Kiana
Aidry
Lina
Kylah
Mikaela
Ella Bean
Sarina
Caitlynn
First night at chapel! I was not prepared for the kids to basically rush up to the front I did not know that was a thing, but it was awesome! They were all up there worshiping the Lord with abandon.
Ella has enjoyed Pastor Tim being the Youth Pastor and he's always there for her when she needs him.
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