la vie en rose

I've fallen behind on the Girl's Camp posts! And I have other stuff to talk about besides camp! I'd better get back on track!

In Spokane when you're a 5th and 6th year camper, you plan camp and then you have a partner and the 2 of you have a group of younger girls you're in charge of. Bridgette was my partner (of course) and we were with the 3rd years. We had about 8 girls in our tent group and there were 4 other groups (there are a lot of girls in Spokane's Girl's Camp). We were so excited and we started making beads and awards in April (camp is in August). The theme that year was "Aspire Higher," so everything was celestially-oriented - the 3rd years were the Moons, so Bridgette's and my little group was the Sailor Moons (of course). Our tent bead was a Barbie head that we painted to look like Sailor Moon.


We had the best time planning together - we spent many nights on Bridgette's trampoline, occasionally sneaking out to go to Denny's in the middle of the night. Okay, I think we snuck out every time we had a sleepover. We found out later that Bridgette's parents were much more cognizant than we realized - I guess we should have pushed the Taurus further down the street to start it.

Several months before camp started, all of the 3rd year YCL's got together to meet each other and figure out our game plan. The 1st meeting was at one of our camper's houses, because she had a huge garage space. I remember seeing a blond girl riding around on a scooter kind of thing and just being really silly. I had never seen this girl before - she wasn't at camp with us the year before. Bridgette and I joined her and before long we were crashing around and laughing hysterically. During the week of camp I got to know this strange blond girl better. And that's how I met my Tina, the 2nd reason that I love camp. And so began many years of Pride and Prejudice-watching and cookie-making and Value Village-shopping and Jamba Juice-drinking and scarf-crocheting and road-tripping and mayhem-making.

Here's Tina at camp, with her partner, Abby.

That week of camp was one of the funnest weeks I have ever had. Bridgette and I really came to love the 3rd year girls that we were with, and we became good enough friends that we hung out with them after camp. It showed me that, as a leader, you can still be a friend with those that you serve. We didn't separate into different tents at night - all the 3rd years and all the YCL's sleep together under the stars, staying up way too late listening to Abby give a scene by scene narrative of The Changeling. On the last night of camp, we decided to pull some pranks. We split up into teams, with one team going to put tadpoles in the 4th years' drinking water, another to take various items from the leaders...I don't remember what my team was going to do; I think we were going to put something up the flagpole. 2 campers and I were crawling on the ground, army-style, in the middle of the night, when a flashlight suddenly shined down on us. The stake leader started yelling for us to get back to our level. We were really miffed by that - surely she knew that staying up all night and pulling pranks were the norm on the last night of camp. We were escorted back to our area, and there we found out why the leaders were so distraught. Several of the 2nd year YCL's and campers had also decided to try to stay up all night. They had stolen Excedrin Migraine from the nurse (it contains caffeine) and swallowed the whole bottle. Some took 4, 8, 10; one girl took 16 pills. A couple of girls had to be taken to the hospital to have their stomachs pumped and the reason the leaders were rushing around with flashlights was because no one knew how many girls had taken the pills. When she saw us on the ground, she thought that we were passed out. When we finally got back with with all of our girls, we hugged them and told them how grateful we were that they were good kids and how grateful we were to have been their leaders.