Planning girls camp is always a miracle to me. You start out with a few women, a couple of ideas, and somehow it blossoms into this amazing week long experience for the girls. Somehow we always manage to have activities planned that are perfectly needed by someone else. Honestly, for me, it doesn't feel like divine inspiration at the time of planning. It just feels like, "hey, that would be really fun to do." But that really fun to do thing happens to be something that some girl really needs. Its amazing how it all works out it the end.
This year, our biggest focus of activities was on team building, working together, and making friends. We had two super fun activities planned for this. Our first activity was building boats out of cardboard and duct tape. We randomly split the girls into groups of 4-5 girls. We gave them 2 rolls of duct tape, a box cutter, and cardboard. They had 1 hour to build a boat that would float them across "Leech Lake" thats our little pond we have at camp, and back again. The girls were SUPER creative with this. We had 3 completely different styles of boats built. And we only had one accident. One girl managed to cut her finger pretty good with the box cutter. Thankfully dad was coming up to be priesthood that day, and just picked her up, took her to instacare, and was able to come back with her a few hours later. Of our three different designs, one of them actually managed to make it all the way across the lake and back. But this particular boat wasn't really a boat. The girls thought to make a surf board that they laid on and paddled themselves across the lake. It worked for our purposes, and we thought it was very very creative. Somehow the stake also planned this particular boat activity. We did ours the day before they did theirs, so we were able to take what we learned from our activity and use it to build an awesome boat that actually won first place!
Group 1's prototype. We were certainly intrigued to see how this boat was going to turn out.
Group 2: They had a very different approach than group 1.
Group 3: These are the surfboard girls. They Had some pretty great tactics for making the boat have more buoyancy.
Group 2's completed boat. Ready for Launch.
Group 1's completed boat
Group 3's boat/surfboard thing
Group 2 sending their little floater off into the water.
Group 1 floating away from the dock
My husband Paul, was our rescue boat. He took a few girls out in a canoe to catch the ones that needed some saving from sinking to the bottom of the lake.
Our little surfer girl out there paddling away.
Paul had to rescue group 1's floater. She made it a decent way across the lake, but her boat sunk and she needed some saving.
The second activity we planned as a "Chopped Challenge" activity. We again split the girls into random groups and had them cook us an appetizer and a dessert using mystery basket ingredients and what few things we provided for them in the "pantry." It was so fun to see how creative the groups where, and what they decided to do with what little resources they had. Somehow the camp directors got roped into being the judges, and let me tell you, eating vienna sausage concoctions while 30 weeks pregnant wasn't exactly awesome. ;) The girls did work very well together though, and I think they might have had fun in the process.
Of course we had to let the YW presidency do the challenge as well. They were pretty creative... Just kidding they did a great job!
Our fun little tent. My cot is the one off to the left of the picture. Then we have Nichole's cute little bed on the floor (no cot), then four cots in a row making one big bead the rest of the way down the tent. We are still pretty baffled that we got all of that to fit in the tent as comfortably as we did,
I do have to say that I am pretty impressed with myself about one thing. I am not a super fan of swimming in dirty lakes. I will swim in lakes, but I like them to at least appear a little more on the cleaner side. But leech lake is not one of my top 5 lakes to swim in, thats for sure. I didn't swim in it last year, and didn't really have intentions to swim this year. But those plans changed when one of our cute little beehives wanted to climb into my canoe. I told her that she could, IF she didn't tip it over and dump me in. She said she wouldn't dump me and and attempted to climb in. Clearly she has never climbed into a canoe before. Even leaning the other direction as much as I could to balance out the canoe, I was flipped over and in the water within 30 seconds or less. She felt terrible. But it was actually quite refreshing. I was out on the lake in a canoe with my phone taking pictures of the girls, (thankfully I had my phone in a waterproof bag, or I would be in SO much trouble). Being 30 weeks pregnant and trying to de-swamp the canoe with a cute, tiny 12 year old girl is not an easy feat. Together we managed to drag the canoe to the side of the lake, then dump out all of the water. By then, the canoe is parked, and I am standing right next to the zip line, so I figured, I might as well ride the zipline while I am wet. The girls couldn't believe that their pregger leader was crazy enough to take the zipline across the lake. It was fun! Didn't fall off or anything.
Of all the fun times we have a camp, testimony has got to be, by far, my favorite. There is not other time, when I feel as connected with the youth, as I do during testimony meeting. They literally pour out their hearts and souls to us. It is so touching, and very spiritual. I don't know what next year will bring. I might be camp director, I might not, but one thing is for sure, I LOVE spending time with these amazing girls.
No comments:
Post a Comment