Girl's Camp, 4th of July, Catch Up Part 2, Cookie Eating Contest, Baseball Championships

Girls Camp was last week.  It was an amazing week.  It was a lot of preparation, but it went pretty well.  As I was leaving I found this meme for Aaron that was pretty fitting:

Luckily, G&G T were able to come and help out with the kids during the day while Aaron was at work which was really nice.  

We left bright and early Tuesday morning.  We were all clean, happy and well rested as you can see:

There were 22 girls and 6 leaders that were at camp full time from just our ward.  It was a stake camp this year.  The stake a lot of the days planned out, but we still had some ward time to just be together.  One of the activities we did is make our own blankets.

I picked up all the fabric and then the girls got to pick out what blankets they wanted.  Luckily, we were able to get all their names embroidered on them which was nice in trying to keep them straight.  Here was mine to show for an example:

The whole week was filled with spiritually uplifting classes and devotionals.  The theme of girls camp was "I Want to be Just Like Me".  Our camp shirts even said "Be YOU tiful" to go along with the theme.  They emphasized that we were made as individuals with our own strengths and talents and how we should concentrate on those and not compare ourselves to others only to bring ourselves down.  It was amazing how much this applied to not only the girls, but the leaders (myself included) as well.  It was a really amazing week and I learned a lot which I am grateful for.

Some of our girls even sang an amazing duet during the Stake Presidency Fireside.

When we were driving over to go hiking we ran into a bunch of sheep being herded up the road.  We were stuck for 15-20 minutes waiting for them to get off the road.  It was pretty amazing to watch all of the herders and dogs work together to get such a big bunch of sheep going, though.

Of course you are sleep deprived while at girls camp and fall asleep if you sit still for longer than 5 minutes!

It was a beautiful area for our hike.

We stayed super busy the whole time we were at camp.  Here's just one day of 4 from my Fit Bit readings:

There were night games, team building games, water games along with paint wars.  I think everyone had lots of fun as you can see one of our girls after the paint wars:

I got to teach a painting class again this year.  I think everyone enjoyed it.  Here's what we painted.  It's upside down, but you can get the drift:

The last day we were there it was one of our girl's birthday.  We decorated her tent with some balloons.  One of the other leaders had brought some cupcakes and Creamies so we were able to celebrate with 'cake and ice cream'.

While I was gone Aaron tried to keep everything running smoothly at home while I was gone with the help of G&G T during the day.  They did get a surprise one morning.  Some kind of juvenile bird was trying to fly around the back of our house, but not doing a very good job.  It fell into one of the window wells.  Aaron sent Daniel down into it to pick it up, but it started fluttering around and Daniel got out of there fast.  

 They caught it and tried to let it go, but it was still struggling to fly--it wasn't hurt just trying to learn how to fly.  About that time Noah let go of Sophie's leash and she went crazy.  She chased the bird down and chomped down.  Luckily she only got a mouth full of feathers before they caught Sophie again.

 It flew out of our yard and our neighbors yard.  We are hoping the poor bird made it!

While I was at camp Aaron would send me funny texts.  One of them was this:

Another he taunted me by sending me a picture of his Fiiz drink.  I was pretty jealous since I was sitting in 95 degree weather chugging my water :/.  

 When I got home Aaron was nice enough to take the kids out of the house for a bit so I could take a nap.  Aaron took them to Lagoon.  It wore Sarah out because she came home and fell asleep on Aaron when they got home.

 It was a whirlwind week as far as girls camp went, but it was great.  I was glad for the chance to be a part of planning and execution.  Now starting to think about what to do for next year....

Life didn't stop while I was gone.  When I got back our garden has gotten huge!  We even started getting tons of zucchini and cherry tomatoes.  Noah is in heaven.

Saturday night we had pizza and a movie night.  Afterward Noah insisted that he needed to sleep in Sarah's bed with her.  Surprisingly they fell asleep without too much arguing!

Yesterday was the 4th of July.  We love this holiday.  We started out at the West Point parade where we got lots of candy.

We did Sarah's hair pretty festive in a star:

Then we headed over to the park to check out the different activities.  We played adult BINGO and kids BINGO, but were pretty unlucky.  Josh tried his luck at the teen cookie eating contest.  Not surprisingly he won the contest hands down.  He ate 8 huge sugar cookies in under a minute.  He didn't even bite the cookies and just shoved them in his mouth whole.    He was pretty proud to win that contest.  He won a Divergent DVD and a huge box of Oreo cookies.  However, he was pretty 'sweeted' out by the end of the contest.

  

Sarah had her turn up on the stage too.  She did kid Minute to Win it Game where they strap a Kleenex box filled with ping pong balls on your back and you try to be the first person to shake them all out of your box.  Sarah didn't win that game, but she had fun trying and shaking her booty trying to bounce out all the balls.

At 1 pm was Daniel's baseball championship game.  It was so fun to watch despite the heat.  Here's Daniel up to bat:

Daniel played 3rd base when it was they were playing in the outfield.  They won the tournament--Wahoo!!  Here's the high fives after the game:

Here's the whole team.  This season was pretty fun to watch.

Afterward called for a celebratory round of Fiiz Drinks for everyone.

Here's the cute baseball boy:

When we got home we had a few down minutes in which Josh fell asleep holding the cookies he won:

Noah fell asleep in the middle of the kitchen floor with his pillow and blanket:

When everyone got their second wind we went outside to play with Aaron's contraption that he built.  He built a candy canon.

When you pushed the button it launched a bunch of candy into the air that the kids tried to catch.  Here's a slow motion video of the launching and catching of the candy:

Sarah stole some snuggles from Sophie in between the candy launches.

Of course Aaron couldn't leave the canon with just launching candy.  He tried launching a few other things, too--like balls, paper cups and rotten potatoes.  That was all fun and games until a rotten potato landed on a rooftop and splattered everywhere.  We had to clean it all up after that.

Later on we roasted s'mores over the fire.

In some of our down time my dad who is serving as an employment specialist missionary in the employment center sat down with me to help me update my resume.  I can't believe that I will be hopefully, joining the work force this fall.  I was really grateful for the help.

Unfortunately, our new neighbor built a ginormous shop right by our fence line so we couldn't see the fireworks from our backyard anymore.  We walked over to the elementary school where we had set out our chairs and blankets to save a space earlier that day.  Wouldn't you know it--the school had turned on the sprinklers which had soaked all of our stuff--DOH!!  Luckily, some nice spectator went in and moved all of our stuff out of the way of the sprinklers so it wouldn't get saturated which was so nice.  Luckily, we were still able to watch the fireworks that night.

It's been a crazy busy week, but now that girls camp and baseball are over things should be calming down--or at least I hope they do!!  It's been a great summer so far!