Fear Factor Family Camp Edition

One of our summer highlights is FAMILY CAMP.  We've been doing family camp at our church for the last five years.  It's a unique experience and everyone gets to come and participate.  Our church isn't incredibly large so devoting an entire week to church camp is a bit taxing and costly.  Plus, our children can attend week-long camps with other congregations which is nice (and many of them do).  For us, a nice, long weekend of camp is do-able, and our church does it WELL.  

We have our camp at Whispering Pines in Castialian Springs, Tennessee.  Each year we have a theme, and this year's theme was FEAR FACTOR.  As you can tell from the picture above, Miles (not necessarily Karson) has a fear of getting his hair caked in shaving cream.  When we started our camp shopping, he told me he didn't want to get shaving cream and do the shaving cream fight this year because he didn't want to get it in his hair.  I told him we could solve that problem easily by getting some shower caps.  BEST. PURCHASE. EVER.  My kids have had more fun with those $1 shower caps this week.  I may have to buy them weekly from now on =).  After packing up our entire house, we took off for camp Friday afternoon.

Everyone usually arrives at camp in the late afternoon/early evening.  After dinner, we divide into teams and play our first team challenge.  I'll spare you ALL the details of the first challenge, but it basically involved phobias, reading clues that take you to the different areas of camp containing phobias and facing what the phobia consisted of--clowns, spiders, snakes, darkness, etc.

Karson and her "boy"friends playing some cards.  This four-pack went to a week-long church camp earlier in July with Greenwood Park. 

The girls all buried under the bunk beds with quilts, blankets and lots of sugary snacks.

I only took two pictures on Saturday (the one to the left and the one below).  I didn't want to keep up with my camera all day long.  My kids are constantly scattered in different directions, and I just want to plop down and relax, especially since I had gotten about 4-5 hours of sleep the night before.  Church camp = no sleep.  I grabbed my camera twice for two quick pics.  I really should've have taken more because our second team challenge would've provided some comic relief to you readers out there.  After lunch at the pavilion, we had another challenge which involved EATING.  It wasn't your normal kind of eating, it was FEAR FACTOR kind of eating.  In summary, Matt had marshmallows covered in mustard dropped in his mouth. I had to pick up whipped cream covered gummy worms and feed them to Miles.  Karson ate a variety of things:  bologna, M&M's covered in ketchup--with NO hands, a sour cream freeze dried cricket and a LIVE worm.  I want to hurl just thinking of it.  Isaac got to participate in the night crawlers challenge which involved searching through night crawlers to find hidden pennies.  The grossest challenge was called The Happy Meal.  This involved what we ate for lunch--a Diet Coke, bag of chips and a hot dog--all blended together into a drink.  Matt and his dad Colvin had signed up for this challenge.  It was D-I-S-G-U-S-T-I-N-G!  Matt said the mixture smelled (and looked) like vomit.  He and his dad only managed to drink about a 1/4 of it.  Only one team downed the entire cup.  YUCK!  The challenge also involved a gigantic slip-n-slide where you had to collect flags.  We had a blast on Saturday.

Andrew usually comes up for the day and brings some toys.  He took people out on the jet ski.  Somehow I ended up driving tubers around on the boat.  I think the men were ready for a break and wanted to do some fishing.  The kids weren't ready to stop tubing so I stepped up to the challenge.  I've driven boats before, but I don't do it often.  We had fun though, and no one got hurt thankfully =).  We ended Saturday with dinner and a campfire devotional down by the lake. On Saturday night, we like playing glow-in-the-dark dodgeball.  I'm not sure dodge ball and small children are necessarily a nice union, but the kids have a blast (tears and all).  I opted out of dodgeball and stayed close to the fire mainly because my brain shut off when smores were  mentioned.  Kids roasting marshmallows on a blazing hot fire isn't the best combination. We figured it would be good to let the fire die down and play dodgeball first.  However, I wasn't about to leave an area where SMORES where about to be assembled.  Are you kidding me?  I love smores! After eating not one, BUT TWO smores, I headed over to the dodgeball field and wanted to tell Miles and Karson I was heading up to the lodge.  I knew both of my lil chicks would want to come with me.  About the time we left the field, it started sprinkling outside.  We made our way over to grab some smores and headed up the hill to the lodge.  We hadn't been in the lodge 10 minutes before everyone started sprinting inside.  The clouds opened up and dumped gallons of rain water down on the camp.  We were nice and dry inside--AND we had gotten our yummy smores too.  Whew =)!

Sunday morning is usually a blur--breakfast, worship, camp clean-up.  Our kids are always super sad when the weekend is over and are wishing they had more time at camp.  I wish I agreed with them, but I'm usually worn completely out and ready to get home.  This year was so much fun though.  Each year gets better and better.  We're so thankful for such a wonderful church FAMILY.