Our Time at Oakbridge #2 - The Adventure

One of the things that Young Life camps do so well is provide kids with a week of adventure. Each camp is a little different as far as what activities are offered, but trust me when I tell you there is never a dull moment. The girls and I get to participate in a lot, but watching is almost as much fun. It is fun to see campers having the time of their lives and discovering the unique person God made them to be. Here are pictures of just some of the activities.

You can't really see him in this picture, but Loren is up there, on the high ropes course, guiding kids through the tightrope walk. In fact, he was up there for almost eleven hours, on a 3x3 platform, as every camper made their way through the course. It is always a highlight of their week as they are challenged and encouraged by their leaders and by their fellow campers. It really breaks down walls among campers and it physically demonstrates the trust you have to have in Christ. No matter where you are in your walk with Christ, the lesson of the ropes course is a good one. No matter how well balanced, or strong, or smart you are, if you don't have a harness(Jesus), you're not gonna make it.

On day three, we have the All Camp Water Olympics. This is such a gift to our kids! They have all these gigantic blow up, bouncy things that are also filled with water...like giant slip and slides and a slide that you climb up and swoosh down. There is a window of about thirty minutes between the time they set these up and the time that campers converge on them and we make the most of it. Both the girls are wild about water...they must take after their mama. (In case you are wondering, yes, I slip and slide, and no, you will not see any pictures of it.)

On night two there is a carnival during dinner. We have barbaque and then the campers can play all sorts of games where they win tickets which can then be redeemed to do all sorts of crazy things to their leaders...like pie them in the face (hence the picture), send them to the dunk tank, give them a hairdo made out of shaving cream, etc. It is really all designed to set the leaders up to be approachable and to make them heros. Oh yeah...there is also cotton candy and snow cones, which makes it another highlight for me and the girls.

Here is a leader at the carnival getting a bucket of water dumped on them by a camper at the "Splash Zone."

Hope thought it looked fun and managed to get enough tickets to send her daddy there. Here she is holding her hammer that she used to send the bucket full of water over...

right onto her dad, who was a very good sport about the whole thing.

This is such a small little bit of all that goes on in the way of adventure. There are also mountain bikes, a rock wall, a dodge ball/paint ball tournament, a Mission Impossible event, Glow in the Dark capture the flag, a dance party, and so much more. It is definitely a month full of adventure for my kids and I'm afraid we're gonna have some withdrawal when we come home. We are used to being entertained from the moment we get up until well after bedtime. Anyone want to volunteer to put on some spectacular events for us when we get home...just to bring us down slowly?

Coming soon...the post about all of our down time and what we do when we choose not to go to some of these activities and instead do whatever we please! Be prepared for lots of pool pictures...that is where you will almost always find us when we aren't at prepared activities. Yeah for the pool!

Our Time at Oakbridge #1 - Is This Really Our Job?

Several people have asked for pictures of our time here in Young Life Land and, until now, the prospect of trying to find a few pictures that give an accurate accounting of our time here has seemed intimdating. I think that's because there is no real way to sum up all the parts of camp in one post with a few pictures. So, I've decided to attempt my first ever “blog series.” (Is there a better word for that…probably.) So, this first one, called, “Is this really our job?” is about all the weird ways we get to dress. We, in Young Life, like to take the verse that talks about becoming fools for the sake of Christ to the next level and we do it all in style.


Before the pictures, I have to relate one specific story to you. I was sitting at a table with other Assign Team members at dinner during "Tacky Prom Night" (more on that later) a few days ago and we were eating. One of the ladies looked across the table and started cracking up. She said, "Is this really our job?!?" We all started laughing as we looked at what she saw...a bunch of middle aged people dressed up...some of us in old prom attire (not the cute stuff, either), the kids in their princess costumes(that's the best we could do in the way of prom attire for toddlers), a couple of people as superheros, and one as Wendy, as in the mascot for Wendy's Burger Chain. It was quite a site.


So, here are some the costumes we adorn at camp and their perfectly legitimate explanations.

This is our family at the "tacky prom" night, which is the last night of camp. At Young Life camp the last night is the one where you dress up fancy and have steak. But Wyld Life camp is for junior high kids and they somehow feel less of a need to get all dressed up...or even shower in the case of the boys. We do still have steak but the dressing up part is a bit less refined. I thought our family looked particularly dashing on this night. Can someone say Christmas Card?

The quality of this picture isn't great, but I think you get the idea. This is Hope in her superhero outfit. The whole theme of the program is superheros and so on one day everyone is asked to come in their own superhero gear. Hope calls herself "Thunder Lightning." I wish I had a picture of my own getup. I didn't really have anything so I pinned a blankie around my shoulders and declared myself "supermom"...always prepared in the case of blankie emergencies.

This is less of a dress up picture and more of a "look how cute Bella is" picture. Actually, this is at the "Birthday Dinner" that we have...hence the hat.

Finally, this is Hope with Wendy and the Burger King...the arch enemies of superheros Captain Caffeine and Fireball. (Just ignore that sentence if it seems to make no sense whatsoever...trust me, it does.) Though you may not recognize him, Loren is the Burger King and this should have been a picture with both the girls, but Bella would have none of it. She screamed from the time we came near them until the time they left. She is learning a hard, but necessary lesson about what a freak her dad is.

Believe it or not, this is only a little taste of the weirdness we encounter and get to be a part of every week. It's awesome!

The Coopers Came to Town!

I have been meaning to share some pictures of our fabulous visit with my sister and her family, but have been so busy, trying to get to California and then getting settled in, that I haven't really had time until just now.

My sister, Amy, her husband, Daniel (Deedee I like to call him :) ), and their boys, my adorable nephews, Carson(5) and Cameron(almost 1) came to town the week before we left for our trip. We only had a day and half with them, but the Lord graciously stretched our time so that we both felt we got a really good visit in. We did a lot in just a bit of time and Amy and I even had time to take in a good cup of coffee by ourselves, with no kids in sight.

I love my sister so much. We had a rocky relationship when we were growing up, though. Oddly enough, I think she resented the fact that I consistently felt compelled to make the "right" decisions. Okay, I was a miss goody two shoes...there's no sense sugar coating it! I can't imagine why it wasn't more appealing to her. :) Anyway, regardless of all that, we managed to forge a friendship in more recent years that only gets better with time. She is an amazing mother, a thoughtful and encouraging wife, and a woman who seeks after God. I am proud to be her little sis and was so blessed to have her in my home. There's just something special about sisters!

Here are some pictures from our visit.

Carson and Hope are only a year apart and love being silly and having adventures together!

The cousins at the Royal Gorge (minus sweet Holden, of course :( )

The Cooper Family

Amy and I

The Permanent Press

Hope has a loose tooth. It’s true. It seems really early to me, but, luckily, the husband of one of the staff ladies up here is a dentist and he assured me that there was no trauma and that her permanent tooth is just making it’s way up and pushing the baby tooth out of the way. It will probably fall out within the next two months. So, it’s all perfectly normal and yet I felt this rush of fear. Seriously, it was my first real taste of this kind of sickening fear. I have alluded to it in the past. “Oh…my children are growing up too fast.”; “I can’t believe she is already doing that. It happens so fast.”; “It seems like she was a baby such a short time ago.” etc. Yeah…this wasn’t that. This was a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, rapid heart beat, feeling hot all over kind of fear. And then, I got mad at the permanent tooth.

I mean, how dare that little tooth get to say when my baby becomes a big girl. How dare that tooth push its way through her gums as if to say, “I’m here. I’m a grown up tooth and I don’t have any use for that baby tooth anymore. Get out of here, baby tooth.” And then, it manhandles that baby tooth right out of it’s comfy gums and shoves it right out of her mouth. How rude!

Okay, this may seem a little overdramatic, but here’s the deal. I think I resent the grown up tooth because it is such a huge symbol of all that is to come. The things that represent Hope’s childhood will soon start to slowly disappear. Not only that, they will be replaced with things that will carry her into womanhood. Permanent teeth. The teeth she will have when she starts to date and gets married and has children. And, I’m not really ready. I thought I was ready. When some of my friend’s children started loosing their baby teeth I thought, “Wow! We are next. Won’t that be fun?!?” Turns out, not so fun. At least not at the moment.

I know this is just the first of those many moments when I will feel desperate to hang on to a part of her childhood that it is time to let go of. Lord, give me the strength to let go. The teensiest part of me is excited, though. I know that moving forward means a lot of hopeful, happy things, too. There is so much that I want to teach her about life, and identity, and boys, and friends, and God. So much that I get to journey through with her.

Last night, when she discovered her loose tooth, Hope was teary at first…worried about it. Then, when we told her she was getting to be a big girl and her tooth was gonna fall out soon, she broke out in a huge grin. A little while later, she secretly confided in me, “Mom…I’m kinda nervous.” My thoughts exactly.

"After the Leaves Fall" by Nicole Baart

Wow! I just finished this debut book by Nicole Baart and I was blown away. She is such a gifted writer and I am so looking forward to reading everything she writes. If you need a good read, pick up her book. You will not be disappointed and it is worth every minute of sleep you lose while reading it. Here is an excerpt from the end of Part One of the book to tantalize you:

My life became a cautious mosaic, slowly taking the form of a shabby mixed media - shattered glass among cool, round stones and tentative, interrupted strokes of inoffensive color. I couldn't see myself as much as I could feel myself in the angles and corners and lines. I was well hidden. Unrecognizable.

I was unfamiliar even to those who knew me best. It wasn't that I was afraid of getting hurt, of losing more than I had already lost. I wasn't trying to hold them at arm's length or be evasive. The truth was, I didn't know who I was, and I was afraid of being defined by who I wasn't. By what I didn't have. By all the tears that I had cried and the catalog of dates that told me who I could never be. By remembering with predictable, cyclic accuracy all I had lost.

I decided I could do better than that. I could handcraft the life, the person I wanted for myself. I could be my own artist, and I surrendered myself to the creation of a Julia who was too smart to attach, too independent to want to, and so secure as to be untouchable. I wasn't interested in allowing myself to wait a single second longer for something I was convinced I could walk up and take.