making the move. come with me!

i'm ditching blogger. you can now find all of my past and future posts at thoughtfulcampcounselor.wordpress.com!

the glory days.

i remember a beautiful time when every table in the dining hall, every chair in the multipurpose building, was full every week.
when there were four full units and four real cabin capers flags, and the colors were the same from year to year: purple for unit 1, gold for unit 2, green for unit 3, and blue for unit 4.
when every position on staff was filled, and(by what i could tell from my camper perspective), they loved each other. they were even allowed to visit the acteen cabins at night after they got their GAs in bed. we were always having fun night visitors.
if a cabin raised a hundred dollars for offering, the cabin leader wouldn't get a talking to about forcing her girls to give.
we didn't sing the same three songs over and over. we had so many that we actually looked forward to having time to sing them. and most of them had Jesus in them.
--Jesus is a rock
--bubblin' over(a different version than the one we sing at campfire now)
--i am a C
--oh you can't get to heaven
--walking in the light of God
and then there are non-Jesus-related ones that are dead too.
--waddley-atcha
--the apple verse from the banana song
--eight or nine verses of boom chicka boom
--the cit verse from i'm a long john
--annie mae

i still love the camp la vida i work at. but for the sake of this new generation of kids, i hope the camp la vida i went to as a camper comes back someday.

monday memories: the funniest fridays.

during one of my best weeks in history(it now sit at number 3 i think), i had four girls who came together. usually that spells out cliques and drama, but they were great. they loved camp and they loved making friends, and they were a huge part of how our whole cabin got so close that week.
on friday, when these four girls left, it was so funny to see how different each of them was. they all felt the same about leaving but showed it different ways.
the first was getting picked up separately. she was the "i loved camp, and i love you, but i love my mom and now i want to see her" type. but she did cry a little when she came to hug me goodbye.
and the other three were the worst. all three were crying their eyes out and all three were doing something different about it.
A was trying not to show it. she was one of the shyer ones that week, so i hadn't expected her to be super vocal about it. all she needed to do was look at me and i knew everything she wanted to say.
B just grabbed onto me and wouldn't let go. she came back so many times for one more hug, i thought all the staff would have been cleared to go home before she'd finally leave for good.
but C...i'll never forget her. i'd never before, and haven't ever since, seen someone go this crazy.
first she hugged me and sobbed until her mom came up. i tried to point this out to her, but she just shook her head and wouldn't look up. well as soon as her mom starts talking, it's like a switch flipped. C gets all animated and starts talking a mile a minute about how great her week was and how much she didn't want to leave. we all told her mom stories for a while, and then as soon as she says it's time to actually go, C goes nuts crying again. i asked her to tell her mom about such and such that happened, and the water works cut off again. her mom reminds her that they need to get going, tears come back.
finally, she hugs me and says, still through her sobs, "i really really love camp and i don't wanna leave you...but is it okay that i love my mom more?"
bless her heart. i loved that child.

all the possible goodbye scenarios with any camper fall into types and subtypes so that they're all basically the same...but there will always be some that i remember more than others. out of all of them, that one's my favorite. =]

you can sit beside me when the world comes down.

to keep myself from rehashing every other after-reunion post i've written in past years, i'll just link to them here so i won't feel like i need to.
about camp looking dead in the winter but really just being asleep:
http://thoughtfulcampcounselor.blogspot.com/2010/12/hibernatingfamily.html

about camp people being family:
http://thoughtfulcampcounselor.blogspot.com/2011/12/confession132.html

anyways.
on the way to camp yesterday, stephanie pointed out that if the world ended today, she'd be totally happy since we'd all be together.
unlike other years, there's not a single person i wouldn't want at the reunion. i love every one of them so much, and i legitly missed every one who had to miss it. as in, i realized without being reminded that each of them wasn't there and had specific reasons why i wished they were there.
and if sitting in cabin 5 laughing with all of them was the last thing i got to do before Jesus came back, i'd be completely content.
i realized last night that i've laughed more with this staff than with any other. i figured it out because when we were all laughing for literally a minute straight, i could listen and pick out every person's distinct laugh, and i could even imagine all the ones who weren't there. i don't think i've never known everyone well enough to do that.
to copy more of stephanie's wise little sayings, being together really is like a glimpse of heaven.
i know that sounds super corny to anyone who's never been to camp. but in heaven, everyone will love each other, no one will fight, and we'll all be happier than we've ever been, right? that is the essence of us.

and i love them a lot.

a fraction of the hurt.

i'm posting this on my camp blog instead of my real life one because when you say "innocent children," i think of my campers.

i'm not going to go on a political rant; there are so many people talking about gun control and abortion right now, i'm sure my opinion has already been said by someone else.

i'm just thinking out loud, trying to wrap my mind around the fact that 20 kids the same age as my campers are dead today.

20 happy little lives stamped out right before christmas.

now i know this isn't anything even close to what they're feeling, but it's my only point of reference since i don't have any real kids to love.
i imagine that a mom is like a cabin leader squared. i think about how much i love my girls, and i try to imagine loving a kid more than that. but they aren't actually my girls. their moms must love them so much more(this is why for me, camp is not "the best birth control" as some people say; it makes me want my own kids even more).
so i'm thinking about how i'd feel if one of my campers died, in any way, much less like this. and i try to multiply that 100 times, to come even close to picturing what these parents in connecticut must feel, and honestly, if i were in that position, i think i would die. i'd lose every ounce of my will to live and just die on the spot.

no matter what kind of psychological disorder you've got going on, who could look at, as obama so perfectly described them, "beautiful little children between the ages of 5 and 10" and want to see them die? i don't even think people screwed up enough to molest a child could bring themselves to kill one.
and not that high schoolers deserve it or anything, but seriously these were little kids. you hear about teenagers getting shot all the time(which i repeat, is still horrible and i wish that didn't happen either), but not kids. people don't even shoot up elementary schools on tv. it's so unthinkable, we don't even think to make up stories about it happening.

there are so many people hurting in so many ways right now. being the obnoxiously compassionate person i am, i'm feeling a little bit of each of them.

in my marriage and family class this semester, when we learned about family stress, we broke into groups and made lists of normative and non-normative stressors. we'd learned that a child dying at a young age was non-normative, so my group listed ways that might happen. we said things like car wrecks, cancer or other diseases, choking to death, falling down the stairs, and tried to think of really crazy freak accidents that could happen.
not one person in the room said "getting shot at school."
i doubt any parent drops their kid off at school in the morning and even vaguely wonders if they'll ever see them again. your kid's school is such a normal part of your life, a taken-for-granted safe place. i feel like even if my kid was okay, my whole world would be shaken up if something like this happened. i'd start questioning everything. if an elementary school isn't safe, what is?

what about the kids?
the ones who died? they're so little. appreciating life is a granted, automatic thing for them; they haven't yet needed to be taught that life is short. most of them don't understand death at all. they probably hadn't wondered a day in their life if it might be their last day.
and the ones who survived? the shooter only came into two classrooms; were there some who never saw him, but had siblings or cousins or friends who were killed?

what would you even do with that? if you had one child make it out and the other died. that's the most overwhelming scenario i can imagine. being so happy and thankful on the one hand to have one safe with you, while not even knowing what to do with yourself over losing the other.

what about people like me, off at college with siblings at home? i have a brother in fifth grade. i wouldn't want to get a phone call to hear he'd been shot, or even been anywhere where he could have been shot, if i wasn't able to rush straight home to my family. it was bad enough freshman year when i had to be far away and hear the news that my granddad died, and i was basically prepared for that but i still shut down, stopped eating, quit doing my homework and lost my scholarship. so if i got a total shock, like a family member getting killed, much less my little brother? again i think i'd probably die. if not from rapid hope loss, then from attempting to hitchhike home as fast as i could.

where's the hope in this? what's the good that God plans on using all this for? parents whose kids die of cancer can help other parents going through the same thing. kids who get paralyzed can grow up and write books about how they managed to still live a great life. but this is just ridiculous. i know this fits with the plan somewhere, but God's gonna have to get pretty creative here.

if nothing else, i hope this is a wakeup call to parents who don't love their kids enough. the parents of the campers who say they don't want to go home because their parents don't hug them or talk to them or just hang out with them like their counselors do. i hope they start appreciating the little miracle they have.

i wish it didn't take tragedies like this to make that happen.

accidental impact.

tours of camp on mondays are always one of the times for happy reunions with old campers. ask any of my girls from any week this year, they'll tell you i paused our tour at least once(usually plenty more times than that) to go hug a girl from another cabin and tell her staffer to take care of her because she's special. once we get back to the cabin i always tell my new ones "don't worry, if we're both back, you'll get one of those next year!"

but one monday this summer i got a surprise of my own.

i'm standing in front of the admin, telling my girls about the flying squirrel, when i hear a voice screaming "LINDAAAAAAAAAA!" and this teeny little girl who i swore i'd never seen before comes running at me like a bullet with the biggest smile on her face and launches herself into my arms. i hugged her and did a pretty convincing job of acting like i knew her; the usual tricks of using a term of endearment instead of her name, saying i'm glad she's here, all those little tricks(which by the way none of those are lying; i'm glad every camper is there, and i did hope i got to see her more that week because i mean she was adorable). she ate it right up and went skipping back to her cabin, turning around a few times to look back at me, with her face still lit up like it was christmas morning.

that night at dinner she did the same thing as i walked past her table. after she let go i waited for her to turn her back to me then frantically went to the next table and asked one of her staffers(i'm pretty sure she was in cabin 15, so i guess it was bailey) what her name was. from here on out i'll call her B. bailey or whoever it was told me she'd been asking about me all day. i admitted that i didn't remember her at all, and she says "well she's pretty much in love with you. i guess you did something!"

every day that week, anytime i saw B(which wasn't very often because we were in separate units), she'd get just as excited as she had on monday. and she was always smiling. one day she got in line to go canoeing for free time, but we filled up so she couldn't go, and when i told her, she just shrugged and said "oh. oh well!" and skipped off to puppets like it was the most fun thing in the world, not something lame for the overflow from the popular choices. she was always so happy, and every time i saw her i'd get happier too.

on friday morning at breakfast when she came and saw me like usual, i told her that i'd really miss her hugs next week and that they'd always made my day, and she looked surprised and said "really?? you made my day too!"
that afternoon i expected her to be a cryer, since she loved camp so much. but she ran to her mom all excited, came back and hugged me for a long time, said she loved me and she'd miss me. then she left, all with her usual huge smile like she'd slept with a coat hanger in her mouth. which was lucky for me, because seeing her still be her bouncing, happy self made me able to not cry my eyes out over my last one of those hugs. =]

campers like her amaze me. one of my acteens, whose first year at camp was my first year working, told me she'd always loved me when she was little and was glad she finally got to be in my cabin. then i've had other girls who i remembered, but who tell me stories that i didn't remember happening until they talked about them then.

you never know what kind of hat tricks God might pull at camp. things that seem insignificant to you, whether positive or negative, a camper may remember for the rest of their life. i hope i never forget that.

how to love a [camper].

i was going through my board on pinterest devoted to quotes, and i found this, which i pinned months ago but forgot about.
now i know that campers ARE children, so you can follow this list and love a camper that way. but i wanted to make my own special list.

how to love a camper.
always LISTEN.
be genuine.
be who you are.
let them be who they are, and praise them all day for it.
give positive attention.
show them what they're good at.
don't do everything for them. teach more than you do.
make them feel special.
let them make some decisions for themselves.
be gentle. never yell.
be willing to explain things more than once.
laugh!
participate in camp. lead from within an activity, not from the side of it.
play whatever game they want in the pool no matter how many times you played it last week.
allow wacky wednesday.
hugs and nice words should be given out liberally throughout the day.
let them think they're your favorite.
choose them over the staff.
be whatever they need.
answer their questions.
love them the same as you do any other camper.
show them Jesus.
"for a camper is a miracle who will soon become a part of your life."