Hey La, Hey La, My Blog is Back!

Hi friends!  It is August which means that I have arrived on the other side of summer, severe tan lines and mystery scrapes intact.  I'm glad to be back, and I'm ready for another segment of theoretically regularly scheduled blog posts.

To give kind of a recap of what all happened this summer, I'm going to do pretty much the same thing that I did last year, which is give little vignettes into what all my job encompasses and a little bit of the spectrum of emotion that occurs over the course of a week, a day, or even an hour at summer camp.  I worked primarily with our Adventure campers (13-15 year olds) and our Explore campers (12-13 year olds).

• I drove a mini bus (Jan the Van) for a first time this summer, and on my very first test drive, I got stuck on the only rock at the entrance to camp. "I didn't even know it was possible to hit anything over here."  I hit nothing for the rest of the summer.
• There was an Explore camper who was obsessed with avocados.  She wore avocado shirts, she told me how she had dressed up as an avocado for Halloween.  As all the campers were covering me in creek paint, she painted a giant avocado on my arm and made sure there was photo documentation of it.
• As we were crawling out of the cave during one of the Adventure Mondays, we sang the majority of the High School Musical soundtrack.
• I have never been more sweaty than during Week 8 Ranchfest.  It was hot, it was humid, and every song we did seemed to involve a lot of jumping.  It was amazing.
• Jan the Van blew a tire during Week 3 Explore on our way back from Clifty Falls.  I stood on the side of I-65 for an hour and a half while covered in creek paint so that I could wait for the tire repair man.  The girls and the other counselors waited for me at McDonald's.  They were thrilled.  I don't know what made me feel worse, that the girls could have gotten hurt when the tire went out, or the fact that we had to feed them junk food because we couldn't get back to camp.  I know exactly which mile marker it was, and it haunted me for the next three Explore weeks.
• After our watermelon offering during Adventure pontooning Week 3, the watermelon rind crown was bestowed upon me for a few precious minutes.  I have never felt more regal.
• During Week 6 Adventure canoeing, I fell out of my kayak.  Twice.  No one else fell out of their boat that day, just me.
• Week 8 Explore boys made up a song called the Lemon Workout Song.  I was one of the chosen few to see the full dress rehearsal at Clifty Falls before the world premiere at camp the next day.
• Because I was in and out so much during the week, I was an add-on during the weekly Adventure headcount ("one, two, three, ..., twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, THIRTY!  And LO."
• Jan the Van and I were a team unit in the eyes of the Explore campers.  We were thanked together in five out of five bead ceremonies.
• I had to send two campers home in the same week, one for breaking the rules and one for an injury.  Both were pretty devastating.
• Week 4 Explore boys sang all 100 rounds of "100 Bottles of Milk on the Wall."  Surprisingly more impressive than annoying.

I was worried that this summer wouldn't be quite as fulfilling as the last because I wouldn't be directly around kids so much and I would be on main camp barely at all.  I was very happy to be proven wrong.  So much growth and new memories occurred this summer, and I loved every sweaty, dirty, sunburned moment of it.