Family Camp

We spent the weekend in Las Vegas, NM at Family Camp. It's a church camp-out that our church has every August at Camp Bluehaven. I never attended Camp Bluehaven as a camper, so the last four years have been my only experience. Brad and Eli love it. They love being outdoors, getting dirty, hiking, campfires, cool weather, the whole shebang. I like it because they like it so much and the church secretary made sure I had a cabin with a good shower. (Really, it's the small things in life that make me happy.) A bunch of our friends went this year, too, so that was fun. Brad tells me we weren't really camping because we stayed in a cabin with a bathroom and a bed. I told him that anytime you have to take your own bedding and Diet Cokes, it's camping.

This might have been the very last picture of Eli clean the whole weekend. It was very rainy (and cold) this year at camp so there was mud everywhere. I never felt dry or warm the entire weekend. Eli seems to be a mud magnet so it was inevitable. I did remember to bring a garbage sack for his dirty clothes and they are now crusted together waiting for me to attempt to clean them in the washing machine. Every once in a while, I have thoughts of just taking the garbage sack to the dumpster, but that would be a waste so I just lock that thought away in the corner of my mind for anther day and just dump the whole sack in the washer with lots of Biz and hope for the best!


Too cute for camp!


Three sweet girls enjoying the fire. Not one of those cute little chairs belonged to any of those girls. Thanks for sharing!


Eli and Dayton around the fire. I think Eli might be a pyromaniac. The boy could not stay away from the fire! If it was lit, he spent his time throwing rocks or sticks or dirt into it to watch the sparks fly. There were only a few close calls when I thought he was actually going to fall in, but that's Eli for you...living on the edge of danger.


I had an epiphany about Eli this weekend. It was during the devotional around the campfire on Friday night. He spent the entire 30-minute devo throwing rocks into the fire. At first, I was stressing out a little because he was throwing rocks while all the other children (except the littlest ones) were sitting and singing. What would people think? Why is he so unable to sit still? Have I not done enough to show my child the beauty of praising God? Does this mean I have failed as a mom?! (I know I'm a little crazy.) But then I wondered if maybe God created this little boy just like this for a reason. Maybe, just maybe, his "doingness" will find a place in the Kingdom of God. Maybe I should spend less time trying to make him quieter and more still and spend more time just revealing to him who He is. Maybe I should focus more on where I want Eli's heart to be instead of making him a cookie-cutter, compliant child...because let's be honest, I have tried and failed in the compliance department. Now I know, better than anybody, that Eli still has his issues. He challenges everything and is less than willing to do anything anybody tells him to do when he doesn't want to do it or has another idea of how it should be done. We need to work on that. But maybe if I just let some of the other stuff go, if I embrace the fact that his exuberance will always overcome him, then maybe some of the other issues will just fall into place. If nothing else, my epiphany just gave me a little hope.

This is what Phoebe spent most of the weekend doing. I'm not sure if you can tell, but there were a lot of these of steps and Phoebe wanted to walk up and down them by herself. It took forever, but what else is there to do? She even grunted dramatically on every step.


This picture is of the bane of my existence of Family Camp...family craft time! Every year it's painting and every year we knock over paint or get it all over our clothes and I wind up a dithering, exasperated mess while everybody else's family quietly and contentedly paints beautiful flower pots. It's not the kids aren't interested (just look at the concentration!), it's just that this year we were inside because of the rain with instructions to not spill the non-washable paint on the chapel floor or on our clothes. Well, we did both! Really, we are over achievers.



Soon after these pictures were taken, I left our backpack (with the camera inside) up in the dining hall. We did lots more fun things that I did not photo-document. Eli caught a fish, Phoebe played on the slides, I lost a riveting game of Skip-Boo for all my highly competitive girlfriends (Liz, I told you that you didn't really want me to come play...you should have listened), I read a book...all kinds of good stuff!

Now we're home and Phoebe is helping me unpack by taking everything out of the suitcases and trying to put them on. So very, very helpful!