Oh how I love Girls Camp. This was my second year as Girls Camp Director for our ward. It was an amazing week for me. I got to hang out with these 11 girls and some awesome leaders all week having fun, playing games, and having a wonderful spiritual experience. The theme was "Marvel in the Service of God" which lead to all of us being a Marvel comic book character and we also got a scripture hero also. We were Falcon the super hero and Nephi was our scripture hero. We got there early Tuesday morning and left Friday morning. We camp at some property that our stake helped buy in Vernon that is perfect. It has showers and bathrooms and we camped in tents. I loved every minute of it. It was so nice to not be evacuated because of a fire, which is what happened last year. We had beautiful and perfect weather with some rain and not too much wind. It was great!
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| First day selfie with me and the girls |
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| Most of the amazing leaders that helped me and came out with us. Caroline Adams, me and Amber Beeler |
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| Perla MacNeille |
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| Amazing new friend Keilah Butler |
The first day was full of way too many things that were so much fun. We arrived, set up camp, and the girls went off on their hike. After the hike, it was ward time, the few hours a day that I was in charge of. So we had all kinds of things planned, doing our nails, making headbands, and we did a secret sister kickoff with 2nd ward YW. After all the little things were done, we got to go horseback riding. Our amazing YW president and her husband who is in the bishopric arranged to bring a few horses up with us so that we could go horseback riding. It wasn't much, but we all got to ride around on a little trail and some of the horses chased each other a little bit. The girls said it was one of the highlights from camp.
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| I got to ride a horse too!!!! |
That night, after dinner, the main event was movie night. Before camp, we were all assigned to make skits as movies and they put them all together into one big movie. We had hot dogs for dinner and then popcorn and candy to eat while we were watching the movies. Our skit was pretty awesome if I do say so myself.
Wednesday, we started off with some certification done by the YCL's. While the girls were off doing that, they had a speaker come to give a little Time out for Women talk to the leaders which was nice to have something for us mixed in the day. After that, our sister missionaries showed up to hang out with us for the day. We ate lunch and as we were getting ready for our ward time it started raining really hard so we headed into our tent to keep from getting wet. The first part of our ward time was Golden Hour where we were to try to have a spiritual talk to some quiet activity and we had the missionaries give us a devotional. They talked to us about different qualities to be BRAVE in the world we live in and how we can strengthen our testimony. It was a great devotional but it was really hard to hear them over the large amounts of rain hitting our tent. After they talked, we made a craft and then the rain stopped. We were so glad it stopped because our next activity was to do archery. It's been a while since I shot a bow and arrow and it hurt a lot more than I remember, but it was fun and I got a good shot or two in. That took up most of our ward time and we played a few games and did another project for our secret sisters.
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| With the missionaries |
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| My shots with 5 arrows |
Later that night was time with the stake presidency. They gave an awesome talk and dressed up as funny super heroes. They talked about qualities of heroes and how we can apply it to our lives. We have an amazing stake presidency and we really enjoyed having them. Every night we had a little YCL devotional at our tents and the YCL's walked by and serenaded us with a hymn so we could go to bed. I had a hard time sleeping the first two nights so I was ready for Thursday.
Thursday, our last full day, was our spiritual day. We started with a special program passing out awards and having the oldest YCL's pass a torch on to the YCL's that will be doing it next year. It was a sweet ceremony and we had 5 girls and it was their last year.
When the ceremony was done, it was spiritual experience time. They made little booklets for the girls to use and they were to go off on their own away from other girls and spend some time reading scriptures and writing in their journals. I hung out with Keilah for a little while and had some great girl conversations, then spent some time reading my scriptures and some conference talks. I enjoy the quiet time. When everyone came back, it was lunch time and then they put together a humanitarian/service project. We made things to send to missionaries. One group wrote their favorite quotes for the local missionaries to pass out when they are walking around. The girls also took turns highlighting some of their favorite verses in different Book of Mormon's for the missionaries to also pass along to others when they are tracting. The last group took a roll of toilet paper and took turns writing notes while unrolling the toilet paper. We sent them to the missionaries that are serving other places from our stake. It was a good experience.
The rest of the day was ward time and night with the bishopric. We did our last little craft and made some cute necklaces and hang out to finish any other secret sister stuff as well. The schedule said to have some photo op time and I took advantage of that. We had fun posing and climbing trees and jumping, it was great. I had a lot of fun taking my camera.
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| YCL's - Heather, Alyssa, Paige, Sarah |
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| 1st and 3rd years - Emily, Audrey, Amy, Katie, Amber |
When we finished pictures, we ate our awesome KFC dinner that bishop brought and played card games and mafia with them. It got to be late and so we had our devotional about testimonies by Bro. Harrop and the things we need to build our foundation. It was followed by a really sweet testimony meeting where the spirit was so strong and it is one of my favorite nights of camp. I felt so privileged to be there and be the leader for a week. To finish out the night, we sang out camp song "If We Forget Ourselves" to the bishopric and then they left.
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| With Bishop, Sis Bolander, and Bro. Harrop |
We got lucky this year that with all the rain we have had, we were actually able to have a fire and roast marshmallows. It was such a fun treat for us since it's been years since we were able to do this. Thanks to our awesome priesthood for starting the fire the night before, it was super easy to get it going again. The big activity was taking the first years snipe hunting. Once the first years from our ward were done, all of 5 of them decided to go and find other wards who wanted to go snipe hunting with them. It turned out to be a huge deal and they had a group of at least 30-40 girls all together. From where we were sitting we could hear the screaming and loud noises and it was awesome. These were such a great group of girls. We took a long time to go to bed and it was the best night sleep I had all week.
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| The girls getting ready to go snipe hunting |
The nest morning we had breakfast and then it was time to pack up and go home. We had it down in no time and we were so tired and ready to go home. I slept as much as possible when I got home for the next 3 or 4 days. I was so tired. I wouldn't have traded it for anything though. It was a perfect week but I think that I'm done with camp now. It's been a little hard on Nate and the boys for me to be gone for 4 days. I believe this is a great program and I love it.
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| End of camp selfie - all ready to go home |
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