Weekly Wrap-Up - June 24

Hiking at Hawk Mountain

Last week can be summed up in one word . . . campmeeting! :)

But for the more detailed approach . . .

Sunday, actually there are no kids' meetings during the day on Sunday. There's a waterslide in the afternoon, but since that's just entertainment, not enrichment, I'm not real excited to go sit up there while the kids do that. This year, we spent Sunday going to IKEA to get shelves to finish off the girls' bed. They are really happy with the way it turned out, I'll have to remember to take a picture of it (when they're not sleeping in it)!

Monday was back to campmeeting (well, actually the big girls had a meeting Sunday evening, so they (and my parents) headed back then). Family Worship was a hit as always. Interestingly, while Little Bit was often abit restless during it, she was excited to go each day. Monday we happened to sit right in front of a lovely woman (whose name I never caught) who Little Bit immediately bonded with. The rest of the week Little Bit made sure we sat in front of "my friend" and was excited to see her each day. The excitement seemed to be mutual :)

Hawk Mountain Lookout

During song service there's always one song when the children are all invited to come up front to help sing, Little Bit really got into going up with her sisters this year. I was sitting too far back to get any pictures, but the "photographers" for the PA Conference facebook page got a few. Here's a link to one (I hope that works, if you're my friend on fb, it should, but I don't pretend to understand facebook stuff LOL).

Monday morning I insisted that Little Bit give her meeting another try. Which she did, without complaint, and participated for the most part, but the rest of the time, I left the choice to her, and she chose to not attend any more meetings.

The big girls enjoyed their meetings, as always, and were thrilled to have a chance to learn archery in the afternoons (they enjoyed archery 2 years ago, and were disappointed when it wasn't an option last year). They also got to go swimming with their class a couple times and while they said the pool was COLD, they seemed to have fun.

Let me just look at my map . . . at Hawk Mountain

Evening meetings (for the big girls) included some typical "playground" games that they've never been exposed to since we're not real big on organized sports. MiniMe was pretty frustrated that the "instructions" on how to play kickball were "it's like baseball only you kick the ball". That's not very helpful for a kid who also doesn't know the rules of baseball LOL. But they seemed to figure it out at least enough to survive :)

Little Bit's week can pretty much be summarized as spending every available minute at the swings :)

I was proud of her though. One morning when we went to the swings, there was trash all over on the grass in that area (apparently some group had used it the afternoon/evening before and not bothered to clean up after themselves). Without any prompting, she said "we need to clean this mess up!" and we proceeded to spend the next half hour or so picking up trash, all at her initiative :)

The big girls have declared that Junior (age 10-12) crafts are WAY better than Primary (age 7-9) crafts, but that Primary has better songs LOL. They thoroughly enjoyed the more challenging crafts, that resulted in a useful, pretty end product :)

Fish tanks at Cabela's

There's a Cabela's sporting goods store right down the road from the campus where campmeeting is held. So one afternoon while the big girls were busy with their activities I took Little Bit over to see the taxidermy animal displays. She enjoyed it, but was sad that the animals had died :) Such a sweetie!

One evening I was feeling lazy so instead of cooking supper I took the girls to Taco Bell, which is conveniently close by. As I was waiting in line to order, Miss Linda came in! She and Pastor Mike moved away about a year ago, and they have been much missed! When Sassy and MiniMe heard that Miss Linda was going to be at campmeeting. She agreed to come up and fill in and do some seminars for someone who had to cancel last minute. Yay!!! Every day, the girls asked "when can we see Miss Linda" but when I'd checked with her early in the week, she'd said she was swamped, getting ready for her seminars, and would hopefully have time later in the week, so I told the girls we weren't going to bother her, she'd let us know when she had time :) And now, thanks to my laziness, we'd run into her at Taco Bell! Woo-hoo. I suspect she used time she really didn't have to come sit and eat with us, but we sure appreciated it! Little Bit didn't remember Miss Linda, but instantly re-bonded with her.  I have declared that evening to be proof that sometimes laziness DEFINITELY pays!

When I got to the motorhome after church on Sabbath, MiniMe was rather annoyed. There had been some questions/answers in their class and Sassy had answered a couple questions (after raising her hand and being called on), and then both of them raised their hands to answer another question and the teacher said that "you girls" had answered enough questions, and should let someone else have a chance. I think that might be the first time that they experienced that blatant a "lumping together" and MiniMe was NOT amused!

Sabbath there weren't any kids' meetings in the afternoon, so we ate a quick lunch and went hiking at Hawk Mountain. That's where most of the pictures in this post were taken.

The first thing that struck us all when we got there was the cicadas! We didn't see very many, but we sure could HEAR them! We saw a few so at least the girls can say they saw the 17 year cicadas.

We all hiked up the first (easy) little ways. There weren't as many hawks (etc) soaring around as there were last time we were there, but it was a gorgeous day and the lookouts were still breathtaking! Once the path went from "walking" to climbing over rocks, we used the excuse that Rodney wouldn't have time to get to the top and back before he had to go work his shift at "Information" at campmeeting, and Rodney, Little Bit, my mom (because that was the only way we could convince Little Bit to come with us) and I turned back. We went to the nature center there for a little while, and then visited the native plants garden. There were a BUNCH of little frogs hiding in the lilypads in the pond there, so Little Bit had fun seeing how many she could spot :)

Meanwhile Papa and MiniMe and Sassy headed on up to the North Lookout. Even Papa was worn out when they made it back, but the girls loved it :)

Saturday night was the end of campmeeting. Rodney was working Information, Little Bit and I headed home, and the big girls and my parents headed to their (respective) meetings.

After the meeting one of the people who'd been working in Juniors all week called Sassy and MiniMe aside and thanked them for being some of the most well-behaved kids in that department this year. This Mama's proud! And glad to know that even if they seem to lay awake nights thinking of ways to test MY patience, they are still "good kids" for other people :)

So that was our week, and Campmeeting 2013.