Girls Camp Day #3

Let it be known that I SHOULD be packing for the scrapbooking retreat that I'm leaving for tomorrow but I NEED to write camp stuff down before I go and forget it ALL. I like to capitalize RANDOM words I guess.

Day 3 started out much better than day 2. I think we were all warmer thanks to our Bishop bringing 24 extra blankets for us the night before :). My phone died before the alarm could go off so we might have overslept quite a bit, but it's ok, so did the rest of camp. Our ward got REALLY lucky and didn't have any chores on a stake level except for bathrooms the first afternoon, other wards had to wake up super early to help with meal set up. We don't do early. So we were up by 7. Our girls ran and got ready. I walked over with the girls to get breakfast while Nicole stayed back at camp to boil water for hot chocolate. I had to cut aprox. 100 girls waiting in the breakfast line to get myself breakfast because I had to go to a 'staff meeting' where they gave us instructions for the day. I felt really bad. At least this time I had a utensil to eat my breakfast with. The day before I had to use my one piece of bacon to eat my eggs and yogurt....mmmmm. It's called improvising/laziness.

Since we had such a huge schedule set back due to the Hikes on Day #2 we had to squish a bunch of stuff into the morning so it was busy. None of the girls knew where to go, I told them about 36 times haha. Oh gosh that was fun. Finally once we got them all to where they needed to be, Nicole and I headed over to the showers for our favorite part of the day, foot scrubbing and hair washing. There is a 5 minute shower limit.....whoever can shower in 5 minutes and scrub all the dirt off themselves deserves an award.

Once we were done we headed back to camp where we started thinking about dinner already. We had a huge pork butt that was frozen in the middle and we wanted to be sure it got done. After cleaning up camp a bit (again.....) I started some charcoal in the chimney and prepped the pork for dinner. We just love pork ok? Ribs and Carnitas one right after the other, sounds good to me. I was crossing my fingers and hoping this would work. I don't do ground beef tacos so I pushed for carnita tacos (I'm really fancy) so this would be all my fault if it failed, I had to prevail. We kept it simple and just let the pork cook then after it started to cook all the way thru, Nicole started shaving the meat off the bone while I squeezed lime juice and garlic powder over it. We just made it up as we went.

Girl talk on day 3 was really good. It was given by a young women who graduated a year ago, who is in our ward and very hip (:)). She also spoke with a girl from our stake who's just a few years older than her. They talked about growing up and the ABC's of life. A stands for Actively Live the Gospel. B stands for Build meaningful relationships with friends and family. C stands for Confidence in who you are. And S stands for Smile. They did such a good job I was very impressed with all their stories they gave and how much they were able to relate to the girls at camp. My very favorite part of their talk was when Hannah (from our ward) gave the girls some advice. I want to take this 'challenge' it was pretty neat. She said, in the morning, make yourself look nice, spend some time doing your hair, makeup, etc....wear nice clothes and look good for yourself. Then look in the mirror one last time as you leave the bathroom, then don't look at the mirror again for the rest of the day. Stop focusing on yourself and focus on others. Those weren't her exact words and I might have to get the exact wording from her but that was the gist of it. I really liked that. They spoke for about 40ish minutes then we headed back up for a short year time I think.

After awhile, our girls camp back to the tent to hang out with the 'coolest' leaders. Our 5th years got to go on a 'fun' river tubing ride......I went on it last time and while it was fun, it was freezing and really not that fun after the first 15 minutes. This time the river was much colder, crazy girls. While we watched the food and hung out making bracelets/painting nails etc.....a girl ran to our tent and told us we needed to get down to one of our girls who had had an athsma attack on the river float. I didn't know if she had her inhaler with her and she was sleeping in another tent so I grabbed one of our other girls' inhalers (is this ok? I don't know) and rushed down the hill (should have driven DUH) to the river where she was. She was sitting there with her friend and one of the stake leaders they were all shivering like crrrazy. I took my sweatshirt off and laid it on their legs and tried rearranging towels to help them warm up. Luckily she had her inhaler so I let her call her mom. The stake leader was literally shaking like she was going into shock so we told her to go get in the shower, we waited for the nurse down by the river. Well finally I called Nicole to grab my keys and get my car down there because the nurse was at the other end of camp. Nicole got down there then the nurse got their shortly afterwards. She checked her out and told her to get into dry clothes and lay elevated in a cot to rest. We had her lay in Nicole's fancy reclining cot and her friend Sophie slept in my cot.

We finished up dinner while keeping an eye on the girls. Since Hannah came for girls talk, Heidi came with her to make us guacamole!! She makes it the best ever so it was a good situation. We had DELICIOUS Carnitas that everyone liked, holllllla. With fresh quac, pico de gallo, fried corn tortillas, and chips. It was so good, the rest of the stake had food envy I think :). No soggy yucky foil dinners for us!! After our delicious dinner, I tried to clean up camp....again theme here?

The other girls and Nicole when to whatever meeting they were having at the time while I stayed with Kaylee and Sophie who were still resting. I made them eat food and drink water. After awhile Sophie came out and started talking to me about church. She's not a member and was asking me why people hate our church and say bad/mean things about it. She also asked what makes our church different from other churches. I explained about temples, the Godhead, the plan of Happiness etc....we also talked about testimonies since it was almost time for testimony meeting. I talked the girls into going to the testimony meeting even though they were still tired. I'm SO glad they went.

Testimony meeting was great. It was so good to hear from so many girls. They all had stories that were fun, happy, sad, heartbreaking but they were all so sincere. My favorite was when a 2nd year talked about going on a roller coaster and how she was afraid of heights but she went on the ride anyways, at the end she said, "I have a testimony that I hope I'm never afraid of heights anymore." It was pretty cute, not quite what I was expecting but still cute. The camp director got up at one point and said that there would only be time for a few more girls. Well none of our girls had gotten up but 2 of them ignored the stake leader and got up anyways. One of those girls was Sophie, who I had just explained testimonies too about 30 minutes before. She was so sweet and her testimony was very heartfelt. She was emotional during the entire meeting and I was so impressed with her for getting up to do that. The last girl was Kaylee, who wasn't feeling good but she still got up and was a great example to us all. (By the way, she started feeling lots better, she just went to bed a little early but was fine thank goodness!!)

Once that was over, we headed back to camp. Our YW leader, Sister Ross came around that time (she spent the night so she could help us drive home the next day). We all sat in our circle and had our last devotional and answered the question, where am I going? It was another great discussion with more notes being taken. Then it started to rain again. We all pulled our chairs under the cover of our two canopies that we had shoved together in an attempt to stay dry. There we had our own little testimony meeting. It was kind of informal but I think it was what some of those girls needed. I could see many of our girls were emotional, including the ones who don't usually get that way so it was a good experience.

We had purchased jiffy pop popcorn then Nicole made a label that says, F2 is just popping over to say hi. We decided 3 wards to deliver them to then we set out to do that in the dark. We were shooed away from the pavilion but by the time we got back to camp, they called us back. The stake had lit 100 candles in white paper bags to represent the 99 girls we had at camp and the 100 years of girls camp we celebrated this year. It was neat. We watched a music video then made our way back to camp where we roasted marshmallows that were as big as our heads, no joke. We had several girls stop by our tent to partake with us.

Finally it was time for bed. Nicole and I stayed up to put together their last little gift. Thru-out the week we had a 'mail-box' set up where they could write notes to each other. We bought little 4x6 photo albums that Nicole decorated cute so we put all their notes in that album with room for camp photos.

Then we went to sleep. And slept. And coughed. And slept. And coughed some more.

Only one partial day left!!