YaYa and Her Week at Camp

Although she’s gone again, this time to North Dakota to spend time with Grandma Kathy and Auntie Dot and some beautiful horses, YaYa returned from Bible Camp and talked up a storm for the two days she was home.  She loved  camp even more this year than last year, and that was wonderful, because to be honest I didn’t even think it was possible to top her experience last year.  She told us all about the things she learned, all the neat illustrations that she experienced that helped her understand more about God.  She tried so hard to be patient with the middle kidlets who were hanging around listening to her every word wanting to know everything she’d done during the week.  She chattered about all the things that happened in her cabin, how much fun it was to go swimming in the lake and what crazy things they did during night games.

She accidentally ended up in a skills class for drama and improvisation, and she completely fell in love with the experience.  “It was SOOOOO fun!  I was laughing the entire time!  You would have loved it, mom, because it was all the nerdy kids like me who didn’t want to play soccer and were OK with being nerdy.”  She said people nearby were staring because they were having the time of their lives.  It was really fun to see her blossoming, because I’ve mostly kept quiet about how I loved forensics, even though when I started out I was super shy.  I haven’t really talked to my kids about how much fun it was to coach speech when I taught language arts.  Of course, I have seen those kinds of experiences totally transform kids into confident people.  I have noticed that although she doesn’t do it very often, when my YaYa reads out loud she reads very expressively.  I have always known she has a remarkable, creative imagination.  From now on I will be playing up how much Auntie Dot loved participating in drama and speech, because Auntie Dot is way cooler than me, and I’ll be hoping that some amazing teachers are coming YaYa’s way, teachers that will inspire her.

At camp YaYa also finally learned to make friendship bracelets, the perfect camp activity!  Last summer I tried to show her how to make these, to give her something to do on a long, hot, boring afternoon, but she wasn’t all that interested, and I don’t think she finished the first bracelet.  At camp she made scores of them, and she and her friends traded them back and forth.  She spent her days at home knotting away.  I have a fondness for friendship bracelets.  I had such fun learning to make them with my Nebraska cousins, and in grades 6-8, I remember trading bracelets all the time with my friends.

I mentioned before that we had a lot of fun writing letters to YaYa at camp.  It turned out that she got all the letters, eleven of them, on Wednesday even though we mailed them on both Monday and Tuesday, so I anticipated that they would be getting to her on Wednesday and Thursday.  Mr. Sneaky Pants was delighted to learn that whenever a camper gets more than 3 letters at a time they have to stand up and sing a song or tell a joke to receive their loot.  It just so happens that YaYa had to sing a lot of  songs and tell a lot of jokes.    Mr. SP has plans of a major letter writing operation for next summer.  He’s not an enthusiastic writer, so I’ll take any kind of motivation I can to get the pencil moving in his hand.