I love camp

How do I love camp? Let me count the ways. Or maybe perhaps not, since there's no real way to document all the ways I love camp. Let me just start by saying I believe we really do have the best life. We are so very blessed to be able to do what we love and to do it by the power of and for the glory of our Creator. I love camp because it's an awesome environment where kids can play outside and develop relationships with big people who love God. I love it because they gain new skills, independence, and practice putting other people before themselves in a community living situation. I love watching the staff interact with them and each other. I enjoy the general ridiculousness that surrounds us at evening games when they dress up, do somersaults and play leapfrog in front of their tribes during songs and cheers, and generally act the fool. Pretty much everything I loved about camp when I was a summer staffer 15 years ago I still love about it.

This was our seventh summer, which is kind of hard to believe. Two blinks ago we were up to our necks in mud and silt fence, looking at the scarred earth where the lakes, pasture, and building sites were going in (and tons of trees were going out), knowing the facility was going to somehow turn out great in spite of the mess in front of us. All the while we were planning and plotting, trying to figure out the details of the program and how best to market something that didn't yet truly exist. 

Then there were babies. Little babies that took up lots of time on the home front. I got pregnant with Amelia while we were in the midst of putting in roads (after the trees out/silt fence in years), and clearly remember driving the loader, filling the bucket up over and over again with large rocks, and lining a drainage ditch beside the main road in with them so it wouldn't wash away. I was having 24/7 nausea. And it was snowing that day. The next week I was filling in at our church while they looked for a full time secretary. I have always liked hard work and loved being outdoors, but the combination of outdoor work's downsides with pregnancy made me really glad the church needed a temporary position filled!

\

Watching the place come together was amazing. By the time we opened in June of 2005, Amelia was 22 months old and Shannon was 8 months old. We received the certificate of occupancy for the Lodge in April, right before our very first Open House. Prior to that I walked around our house with three phones on my person; my cell phone, the house phone, and the office line we had at the house since we weren't in the office yet. You never could tell when I might need to answer one of them but was in the middle of nursing a baby or changing a diaper. (I was always thinking, "If only the person on the other end of this phone could see what I'm actually doing right now!") Not that the camp line was exactly ringing off the hook. It was quite a challenge to get folks to send their kids that first summer. Or really even the second or third...still a work in progress, actually.

I had personal struggles during that time, trying to figure out how to let go this huge dream in lieu of the ministry God had given me at home. It was impossible to be as involved in camp as I wanted when I felt called to be mostly at home raising kids. I did as much as I could from home to be helpful, but toddlers, babies, and pregnancies take up a lot of time and energy. It felt all wrong to send them off to let someone else take care of them and be their surrogate parent. Still, it was an internal struggle for a long time. I'm proof that God can change a heart and give contentment though. I'm not only content, I'm fulfilled. God sent us Daniel at just the right time too, in the spring just before we opened. He has pretty much every skill James and I lack, plus he, too, is a fellow camp junkie. The circumstances and timing that brought him to Strong Rock couldn't have been orchestrated by anyone but God, and we are grateful for him every single day.

Now, to fast forward (then rewind!) back to June and July. I have a few random pictures from this summer, though not nearly enough to be representative of it. I took quite a few pictures to help out with the daily photos we post to the website. Parents enjoy seeing what's going on at camp while their kids are there, so we take no less than 150 each day. I had an ailing computer at the time, so I didn't save many of them to my personal one. There are some from all of the sessions, I think.

Canoeing classes like swamp the canoe day. We had so much footage of  kids paddling swamped canoes in our session videos that it looked like we didn't know how to teach them how to canoe properly!

Thank goodness somebody figured it out.

Soccer. Duh.

 

Riflery.

Climbing and belaying.

Older classes get to skeet shoot as well. James usually teaches skeet shooting.

 

Rambo's  Angels (?)

 

I never mind taking pictures at the barn. 

Here's Karina on Kiefer. She came to camp 4th session and we were glad to see her! Still trying to get her folks to let her move in with us...

Maggie D., who came to third session.

And now, a moment to salute our staff. You never know what you're going to see around here.

Sometimes there are no words.

Not sure what's up with all the dresses on the guys. I apparently have no pictures of any girls' staff in wacky dress saved on this computer. There was definitely plenty of it though!

Everyday during 6th period kids get to choose what they want to do for the last hour. Most swim or blob, but several choose to come to the barn to help clean, turn out horses....and have a shavings fight! Good thing they're clean shavings.

All I can think is "itch itch scratch scratch ."

Awahili cheers!

Waya cheers! Cheers happen from both sides at every evening game. Amelia and Shannon played every evening game, all summer long. Avery and Elizabeth mostly ran around the field the entire time, every evening, all summer long.

On Saturdays during two week sessions we a have special carnival-type activity on the field. This year it was a luau theme. Notice the creeper sticking his head through at the top. That's Ty (aka Buzz), who was visiting for the weekend and helping out during Daniel's absence. He had a wedding to go to out of town, and went though he begrudged the timing. No one ever thinks of us poor camp folks when planning a summer wedding!

Little people and big people alike lined up to dunk Rambo.

Score!

Gotta have some face paint.

Lose the flour game and pay the consequences!

Shannon didn't take fishing class during his session but James took him fishing one day during a class.

Success!

The kids and I block out 4:30 to 5:30 everyday to join the campers for free swim. The lake is warm all summer, especially on the top layer. You hit warm spots all the time. I don't trust them, but I like them.

Hi-yah!

Ultimate Frisbee.

Hugs (aka Priscilla) and some ladies from the oldest cabin.

Outdoor Living class after a day of geocacheing.

Had to be there to understand this one!!

Rambo in action at an evening Lifeline. Stretch and Pepper were visiting that weekend, a treat for us since they were WAY BACK from summer number one! Having met my husband at camp, it's pretty cool to have had that happen at Strong Rock too. They're expecting a future SR camper. :)

Here's a huge reason why I love camp. This is where friendships happen, where relationships are built. Friends James and I made at WinShape and Skyline 15 and 20 years ago are friends we still have today. God made us relational creatures, and if relationships weren't important to Him, He wouldn't have gone so far out of His way to offer a way for us to have one with Him.

Did I mention that this is a fun place too? Summer 2011 has now been over for nearly two months and already I'm counting down the days until next summer. I miss it! We will be adding two weeks to next summer for a total of eight weeks.It's exciting, and yet a huge responsibility to make sure we have it filled.

Since camp has been over we haven't lacked for folks being there. We've hosted several retreat groups, and then had Strong Rock Family Camp last weekend (Labor Day). More on that in a future post.

And now I shall close this post. But I can't close it without leaving you with a few Elizabethisms from the past two weeks.

We were just on vacation this past week (again, another post, another day...or year), and the older kids and James and I were going to play Bananagrams, a word game played with Scrabble-like tiles. Elizabeth wanted to play but I explained that she needed to be able to spell before she could play that game. She said, "I can spell. I can spell three." I told her to spell "three" for me, so she held up three fingers and said, "That's how you spell it!"

In preschool choir (I'm helping out with it this year, both Avery and Elizabeth are in it), we sing a few silly songs including one about dinosaurs. Part of it says, "We are the dinosaurs, we make the earth flat. We make the earth flat." She was singing it at home a few days ago and sung "We are the dinosaurs, we make the girl flat. We make the girl flat." Misheard song lyrics, if you don't know, are called "mondegreens." Check out kissthisguy.com for all kinds of misheard song lyrics and a few minutes of time wasting fun. (For example, Away in a Manger has some verses that include, "The cattle are blowing the baby away," and "The little Lord Jesus was eating the hay.") **Disclaimer:  The writer of this blog is not responsible for the personal offense any reader may take to the misheard lyrics on kissthisguy.com, as all of them are not, ah, exactly G rated.

My mom tells me when my grandaddy was first saved they were singing the old hymn Without Him, part of which goes, "Without Him I would be drifting, like a ship without a sail," and he proudly sang "Without Him I would be drifting, like a fish without a tail." Same idea, I guess!

I may have posted this before, but this is a song which has resurfaced at our house lately. A couple of years ago the kids came up with this little tune when the movie Cars came out. "Piston Cup, Piston Cup, everybody wants a Piston Cup." Now sing it to yourself pronouncing "piston" like they do. "Pist-in cup, pist-in cup, everybody wants a pist-in cup." Cracks me up every time.

Now the question I know that's on your mind. What will the next installment of The Happy Himstedt Home have in store for me? Upcoming posts will include: A family hike, Amelia's birthday, horse day camp, and the Himstedt/Adams family vacation. See ya in a few weeks/months/years!