so, what's next?

Summer camp 2009 is officially over. It is bitter-sweet. I just love living here and working in what we call the "conference season". I love my neighbors and having the opportunity to work with them. I also love summer camp, a lot, and I am sad that it's over. It is always so incredible to see the hand of God working in the kids lives.

When I go into the Day Camp room it is just an empty shell- the games and books and coloring books and crayons have all been put away until next year. Some kids come for all 40 days of Day Camp and it just made me so sad that they wouldn't come back on monday morning. The staff that greeted me every morning has dispersed back to their homes all over the country. I will probably have no reason during the conference season to sing worship songs about bottles of ketchup or do "moose ears" to get a group of people quiet. Nor will I look out my back window and find a sea of children in my "backyard". All in all it was a really great summer that is behind me and I am looking forward to the fall that lies ahead. Camp is so great, but it literally absorbs most all of your time in the summer. If I haven't seen you in the past 10 weeks because of this, let's get together! 

This conference season I speak of all starts in just a couple of hours. I am the host for this weekend's group of about 100 church members. I hope I remember how to do everything... I am sure tonight's dinner will be a little different than camp- no cups banging on the tables or chanting down the aisle. 

Anyway, Ben and I finished out our summer by spending the past few days in the Outer Banks with his family. I read an entire book in two days on the beach. I swam in the ocean a little, checked out some seashells as they washed up with each wave, and I even went out in a kayak on the ocean one day. Saw some dolphins, which got me to thinking about the sharks in the ocean and so I parked my happy self on a green beach chair (where I finished my girlish-fiction novel) for the duration of my stay. 

We got to take Rigby on vacation with us (since her new home is with Ben's family). It was fun to have her there, she's such a sweet dog. I took her with us to the beach one day and I even made her swim- it occurred to me that this was probably her swimming debut, so it took her a minute to realize she instinctively knew how to doggy-paddle. Then she rolled around in the sand and got disgusting, but she seemed to enjoy it. 

Add in a half-mile jog back to the beach house and I am pretty sure she hated me at the end of the day. That is about all the excitement this old girl could take in one week.

 

It was a nice end to our summer. So, we'll work this weekend, and then next week Ben will head back to school. A new school actually, as a science teacher exclusively, which I think is just hilarious seeing as he took only one online biology course in college. I think he is a really fantastic science teacher though. I am looking forward to substitute teaching again this year and cleaning here at camp (with a partner this year! which is very exciting). And thus begins the "conference season".  

So long, sweet summer.