Girls Camp

A couple of weekends ago, all 3 of us girls got to go away to camp for 3 days.  We went with the girls group we're involved in at church and since I teach Delia's class every other week, Ella asked me to be HER cabin counselor for the weekend.  When it comes to kids, the younger the better for me!  I must admit that I was a little nervous about a whole weekend with middle school girls, but they were a delight!  Noisy and not very excited about sleeping, but a delight! :)

It was the first year at camp for Delia and I and, though Ella told us a bit, we didn't really understand what to expect.  Pretty much everything about camp exceeded my expectations!  The girls were kept busy the entire time with worship, organized group games, and rotating around various station activities.  

We spent an hour at each station.  (You will see mostly pictures of Ella since it was her and her friends I was in charge of hanging out with this weekend.)  One station was a super cute art project.

At another station we were challenged by a speaker about not just "having the right Christian answers", but putting our faith into practice.  The girls were given some practical tools for making Bible reading, gratitude giving, and praying a more intentional part of their daily routines.  We then made Prayer and Gratitude Journals.

Another station had the girls get their creativity and teamwork skills on with a doll making competition.  My 7th grade girls wanted to make an Olympic themed doll and they won!

  

The theme for the weekend was "On Your Mark, Get Set, GO!".  We spent a lot of time decorating our cabins with items relating to the theme and for the Theme Night we were invited to wear running and work-out clothes.

That big Theme Night held our favorite event of the weekend too-- a Talent Show!  The girls learned about it when they arrived, so the time they had to prepare was minimal, but we still saw some amazing acts!  Some girls sang, or played piano, or danced, or did gymnastics.  When girls were clearly nervous to be on stage, the crowd rallied around them, cheering and rewarding them with standing ovations.  The encouragement and bravery was such a touching thing to see from middle school girls!  Both Ella and Delia pulled a group of friends together and wrote/performed funny skits.  You know my girls can't resist a stage!

All of us counselors had the plan to surprise the girls when the talent show was concluding with a surprise "Flash Mob" style dance.  Well, the energy in the place was off the charts after all the acts and encouragement and as soon as our counselor song started playing ("Can't Stop the Feeling") and we adults jumped up to dance, the girls automatically did too!  They flooded the stage and instead of us performing for them, it became a giant dance party.  It was such a great moment.

Here's my one picture of Delia and her 5th grade friends.  She had SUCH a great time!  

The worship times were really powerful too.  These girls spend a lot of time doing this sort of thing in school and church.  It's always beautiful to see them get out of their normal routine and meet the Lord in a special place.  I got choked up seeing my own girls initiate postures of praise-- hands raised or arms around one another.   Their faith is real and it's such a gift to get a little peek at how they live that out when they're with their friends.

This camp is a merge of all the area churches bringing their girls together.  We had 135 present.  Here is the group we took from just our church.  I have my own amazing memories of going to camp with my church group when I was this age and I was super blessed getting to experience the counselor side of it.  A week of fatigue followed since there was nothing relaxing or recharging about this weekend, but it was TOTALLY worth it!

(And since my post is lacking much Delia, here are a few shots of her when we got back from camp and started working on making burp clothes for all the babies of our church and pregnancy center for our sewing badge the next week!)

#Nationalpuppyday

Last week was #Nationalpuppyday and I posted this on Instagram: "It's sweet puppy moments like these that still make me so happy Ivy is a part of our family.  Even when she chews the grill.  And the hose.  And the table.  And the rugs.  And the rugs I bought to replace the ones she destroyed."  

We've had this tail-wagging bundle of energy licking and loving us for 6 months now and we wouldn't have it any other way, even if the cost to my yard and random items in my house is more substantial than I planned!

Starring Delia!

Okay!  Finally the post that forced me to get caught up on the blog!

Last year our school changed the format of our 4th/5th grade performance a bit.  Instead of casting a play with just a few big parts, they now do more of program that allows every student to do a little something.  So, though she did have a speaking part, solo, and dance number, Delia was in no way the actual star.  The title of this post reflects what was in her mind! :)  You see, this little performer of ours has been auditioning for her big moment on the stage for the past 10 years of her life.  Her resume includes probably 200 living room performances-- everything from the dramatic, to dance, to comedy, to musical.   This program will be the highlight of her 5th grade year.  She's been talking about it for the past 2 months and we were thrilled to finally see every single one of the details she's been sharing with us unfold in real life tonight!  One of those many details being the map of the auditorium Delia kindly drew me, with a big circle around the seats she thought we'd enjoy the best view of her from. :)

Their program was called Go West! and featured a series of songs and speakers explaining the many reasons (gold, railroads, etc.) that settlers moved to and stayed on our lovely West Coast. 

  

 Singing her heart out.

 Singing her solo!

 Her favorite part: the dance number to "Steamboatin'"  The costume changes may have been the best part of this whole thing for Delia.  How she loved her fringy flapper girl and silky blue towns-person dresses!

This cracked us up.  While other kids recited lines and acted out a race scene, Delia just stood in the very front center of the stage smiling.  I kept expecting her to say something or sing, but she never did!  When I asked her about it, her reply was "Oh, I just wanted to be in Scene 5, so I asked my teacher if I could be a decoration and she said, 'Okay'"!

There are a million reasons we LOVE Delia's teacher this year and here is one of them.  Before she came back to teaching, she was a professional photographer.  Yesterday, after the dress rehearsal, she took all these darling posed pictures of the kids and then gave us the code to download them off her photography website!  You can imagine how thoughtful and awesome a picture nut like me finds this to be!!

   

A little after the curtain call fun with Delia's BFF-- serous and silly pictures.

I've written before about how amazing it is watching your kids surprise you by doing things you could and would never do.  It makes me smile huge seeing yet another daughter following in her dad's stage-loving path.  Though Delia did not do any more than any other kid tonight, there was something in her, an exuberance, that did have her shining on that stage.  And many others noticed it and complimented us on it afterwards too.  I love seeing her do something she loves so much and hearing the joy it brings to others as well.

They Indulged Me in Blossom Pictures!

Last year the girls said they were feeling a little old for almond blossom pictures and I respected that.  Then I felt sad that I had none, so this year I asked again if I could take JUST A FEW of them REALLY QUICK in the neighborhood orchard one Sunday after church.  

They are such good sports! :)

Long Weekend Outings

February also contained a long weekend that we tried to take full advantage of.  A wedding and an orthodontist appointment kept us from any overnight travel, but we managed to get a couple day trips in.

Delia requested that one outing be to a zoo.  We've actually already been to several world class zoos (San Diego, Chicago) this year, but I did realized there was one not too far from us that we've heard good things about, but had never visited.  It did not disappoint!  The zoo was smaller than others that we've recently explored, but it featured a lot more hands on, up close experiences with the animals!  For example, there were no cages in the monkey house. When walking through it, the monkeys were jumping all around us!  Same with the kangaroos, we could stroll right through their enclosure and get close to them.

 Ella saw her favorite, the sloths, doing the oh-so-exciting trick of taking a nap-- and doing it every time we went to check on them throughout the day!

We fed and petted sting rays, which was MY favorite, but not so much Delia's.  It was a very strange sensation to have them put their mouths around your fist to suck up that little fish!

 And the zoo had this beautiful new Africa exhibit, where wildebeests, giraffes, elephants, rhinos, and lions seemed to live together. (I know there was probably some sort of tricky separation guests could not see, but it seemed very natural.)  Here a highlight was watching the mama, papa and baby rhino together.  He was nursing with mom and sparring/wrestling with dad.  Quite the show!

Another morning of this long weekend, the girls and I headed to the trampoline park.  We snagged the first jump time of the day and had it pretty much to ourselves, which is how Ella ended up spending nearly the entire time on the climbing wall with no lines.  She started asking me to time how long it took her to get to the top.  Thirteen seconds was her record!

Much of February in One Convenient Post!

Remember when I used to post almost every day and a month like February would easily have 20+ entries?  Well, here you go-- our whole month captured in 6 pictures! :)

 We made Valentines.  Though they're old enough that this is now optional, I love my girls' desire to continue giving Valentines. And not just give them, but HAND craft them each year!  Ella did drawings of cute little animals.  Delia did emojis with chocolate heart eyes.

 We battled that nasty flu.  Thank you, Lord, that it only took down Ella.  But she had it bad-- 5 days of misery and several weeks until her energy level and appetite returned to normal.

 We celebrated surviving a rough week with a GNO at the fancy seat theater.  We saw "The Greatest Showman" and have had the soundtrack on a pretty much continuous playing loop in the car ever since!

And Dave took his annual trip to Guatemala.  They had one of their best times ever this year, with a big, energetic group and Dave feeling the healthiest he's ever felt.  Investments in relationships were continued, a family prayer partnership program was established, and funds for another new school building were delivered. 

Our February also contained an Honor Band concert Ella was selected to perform in with schools from all over our area.  She was one of only a few from our school picked for this and played second chair saxophone in the huge group.  We were proud! No pictures and my videos of it are too long for the blog, but they actually sounded awesome for a middle school band!

Babysitters, Meatballs, and Prayer Boxes (Intrigued? Keep Reading!)

Hello, Faithful Blog Readers (or just me in a year feeling nostalgic and scrolling through old posts)!  Tonight Delia was in a very fun school performance, in which her extreme enthusiasm for being on stage had her glowing.  I'm excited to post about that so far away family who could not be at the program can still get a glimpse...

BUT before I can do that, I need to go all the way back to January and write about the other things we've been up to.  It has to be in order, sorry, blame my OCD. :)

One thing keeping us busy this winter has been our involvement with the girls' group at church.  In January we hosted a CPR and Safe Sitter Certification Class for our girls.  We hired a teacher to come to church and spend the day training our girls to be the best babysitters ever!  Seriously, the class was so thorough, Ella now knows how to handle everything from a bee sting to cardiac arrest!

 Practicing the Heimlich Maneuver on each other.

 A whole crowd of certified Safe Sitters!

Then our group hosted the annual Soup Supper,  Ella actually had some oral surgery related to her braces the weekend of the Soup Supper, so she was unable to attend and serve.  She still helped out by making many many pounds of meatballs for the Dutch Soup in advance with me.  This may have been torture for the pup.

And recently, Delia's class, the one I teach, finished the Prayer Badge.  I always like to reward my girls with some fun project after they've read and discussed a bunch Bible passages and thought about and written answers for a bunch of pages of questions.  We made these sweet little prayer boxes!  The inside says "When your head starts to worry and your mind just can't rest, put your prayers down on paper and let God do the rest".  My girls really enjoyed creatively crafting these at our last meeting.  Special thanks to Grandma and Grandpa for collecting and mailing us all the Altoid boxes!