We just got back from family camp at Somerset Beach Campground. We were there for the past week. I love family camp. It’s a great opportunity to reconnect with friends we don’t see so often. It’s a time for the kids to spend with their friends. They develop some great friendships and make new friends, too. It’s almost always a time of spiritual growth for me, too.
This year the theme was “passing the torch” and instead of one special speaker for the week, there were several retired pastors/superintendents who gave the messages for the evening services. I have to admit, being in the younger generation (I know, I’m not so young anymore…), I was not terribly excited about hearing these guys…but seriously, they had great messages, wise words, and amazing stories to share with us! I got so much out of their talks. Also, in the morning bible study we heard Pastor Larry Cranston. He is a great teacher and spoke one day on dealing with conflict and another day on forgiveness. Great, great teaching on those two days. I need to get the recordings of those two bible studies so I can remember everything he said. I mean I took notes, but he covered so much! Good stuff. I am thankful I had the opportunity to hear him.
We spent every afternoon at the beach of Mission Lake. Got a lot of sun, but came home with great tans! Karson really improved his swimming skills and can actually stay under water for about 10 sec. without even holding his nose! Jasmin enjoyed the water. She was either throwing mud or filling any container she could find with water and dumping it on the sand. Why she enjoyed that so much, i will never know…but she is 2. She did float around in her floaty a lot, too. Savannah loved riding the paddle boats and swimming out to the raft with her friends. And Savannah and Max really enjoyed playing carpet ball which apparently is a big hit at the beach.
I did not take many pictures of camping. We were pretty busy, and most of our down time, I was cleaning up after four kids who were also just as busy! Our camper was a wreck most of the time…but we had fun.
Bed time was hard almost every night. We usually did something with friends or family every night after the service and were out till way past dark. And usually that involved some kind of sugary snack…root beer floats, ice cream cones, s’mores…it wasn’t easy to get 4 kids to sleep after that…and it was late when we started to get ready for bed anyway! The first night Jasmin didn’t go to sleep till 12:30 am…she was laughing, turning on lights and getting out of bed. I was exhausted by the time she settled down!
Something that was different this year, was my parents were around for pretty much the whole week. The didn’t camp there, but stayed at our house in Jackson instead. They spent some time meeting with someone at a bank they are getting their new house financed at, and looking at houses. While they were here, they accepted an offer on their house. Pretty amazing thing (these days) that they had an offer just a few days after they listed it! We are pretty excited! Looks like they have closing scheduled for August 20th or somewhere around that. Now we just need to find a house around here. They found one they like, but aren’t totally sure they are going to make an offer on it. We may go look at it with them later this week. And the time that they weren’t busy meeting with their agent, they were out at camp with us. We enjoyed having them around. I know the kids loved it!
But camp is over. We have great memories, lots of dirty laundry and a camper that needs to get cleaned out. I have a lot to do tomorrow and Monday, because on Tuesday we are going to be interviewed by the CitPat at our house. We will have Pirate Island at the Jackson County Fair in a few weeks and they want to do a story on our family, I guess. THAT should be interesting!
