Girl's Camp 2011, part 2

Continuing from my last post, there were a lot of fun activities besides embarrassing the newbies. On our first full day there, I got to run around with some of the girls as they went from station to station. They painted prayer rocks, we all got to learn how to properly tie a full Windsor and a single Windsor tie (now all the girls have a preference and can tell the young men in their lives which tie to tie for church), and the girls also did a fun service project of tying quilts.

Some girls got it right away.

Some people struggled before attaining victory. 

We also set aside some time for spiritual activities. One of my favorites was when small groups were led to a hillside and told to find a peaceful place to stop and write their testimonies. Everyone was given a piece of paper and a pen and got to listen to quiet music if they chose to stay close or if they wandered a little ways off, they could just take in the sound of the breeze through the trees as they wrote. There were no rules as to what you could write, you just wrote whatever you were inspired to record--your testimony as it stood right then. It was a really cool experience watching the Young Women considering what to write.

One of the adventures that lasted the whole time of Girl's Camp was trying to find our Stake's rock. Every year someone hides a special rock that has been decorated ("bling-a-fied" according to the Stake leaders) somewhere within the camp boundaries, and this year it was the Priesthood that hid it. The Girl's Camp stake leaders were the ones that decorated it, and every day we'd get new clues as to where it was hidden. The girls looked everywhere. Every day you'd see tons of girls scouring the hillsides, looking under logs, peaking into crevices. One day Emilee, Shauna, and I all went trekking through the woods and up some hills. I got halfway up a really steep embankment (in my galoshes!) and realized that I'd rather keep going up than try to get down. This won me the honor of being called a mountain goat by Shauna then and again a week later when she shared that story with our ward over the stand. But alas, we didn't find the rock that day, or any of our days there. One of our YW Micah got really bugged when she thought she saw the rock (it was shiny and looked to be silver) and she half ran, half fell down a hill to get to it before anyone else did, only to find that it was a mylar balloon. Sad day. The search for the rock also led to camp pranks. Our dear YW decided to paint a fake rock, and hid it near one of the other camp sites. Their thinking was that if another ward found that rock that they would keep it to themselves, thinking they'd found the true rock, and they would quit looking. And once one rock was made up and set out, why not eight more, to hopefully keep all of the competition back at their camps and not looking? Well, it kind of worked. We watched as one ward found one of the fake rocks and started dancing around, then stop, scooped it up, and ran off with it hidden in someone's jacket. That evening when we were getting ready to hear our devotional, that ward was called up to show what they had found. They excitedly carried it down to center stage where the Stake Leaders said, "You have found a rock! But it is not THE rock. Keep looking." And they were given a consolation prize of a box of cookies.

More silliness:

Please click on this to get a good look at the faces these girls are pulling.

What is most amazing about this photo is that the girl at the top of the pyramid (Andi) had climbed up there on a broken arm. Did I mention that we slept in pods? In bunkhouses that were glorified rail-car containers?
Well, this is what the girls' side looked like:

If you'll notice-- the roof was smashed in from the snowfall that winter and there were roll bars only on the top bunks, not the second level. Apparently our bunks were the only ones that bad off. And little Andi went rolling off her bed in her sleep, all bundled up in her sleeping bag. She fell down right on her arm. It was a good thing her mom was our camp director. She was able to be with her and hold her and help console her. Only we didn't find out for sure that her arm was broken until three days after camp. Yep. She was such a trooper that her mom thought it was just a sprain, but she was wrong. Andi wasn't our only nurse's station visitor, though-- another girl went home with a stomach virus. And another girl had to go lay down because of altitude sickness, and a few others had to get stuff for their sunburns. Never a dull moment at camp.

Last, but not least of the silliness-- a spinner game of jellybeans. You could land on white and get coconut or baby wipes. Or you could land on green and get pear or boogers. There were also options of getting marshmallow or rotten egg, etc, etc. A bunch of the girls were playing it and wanted me to try a few beans, so I did, but they were all the tasty ones. The rule was, however, that you had to eat whatever kind you got.

I wasn't interested in partaking of toothpaste or moldy cheese flavored jellybeans because I could guess at what those would be like, but I told the girls that I might be persuaded to try the centipede flavored one. I mean, who knows what a centipede tastes like, right? The other option for that was strawberry jam. I ate five strawberry jam flavored jellybeans in a row, so then Emily grabbed one, and as you might have guessed, on her first try she got a centipede flavored jellybean. Oh, the faces she made as she tried to choke it down.

Emily then decided that it was to be my fate to have to go through what she did. So she handed me red speckled jellybean after red speckled jellybean, picking out only the ones that could have been centipede. I ate sixteen delicious strawberry jam jellybeans. And it looked like there were no more red speckled jellybeans. Emily was ticked. But she found two more. The first, strawberry jam. But I finally got my taste of centipede and man alive was it disgusting. It tasted like the smell of fungus, dirt, dampness, and rotting leaves. It was horrendous. And I hear that there are pictures of me eating it.

But since I can't get my hands on those photos, I'll share a photo of Paige eating some other disgusting flavor:

Later, we just started snacking on the jellybeans when hanging out in a group as a sort of jellybean Russian roulette. Yep, we're weird like that.