A visit and back home

Sunday 5th: We headed off with Asher to give her some time outside before the Sunday morning service started. We were glad the balls had been left on the court.
Her bike and scooter have been well used by many children this weekend. It was nice for her to get a few laps around the court this morning. She normally does laps around our deck, so it was nice and therapeutic for her to do something similar to her home routines.
She does love these flowers and as they are weeds, she can often find them. She loves pulling them apart, each little flower at a time.


After the service and lunch we headed off to spend the afternoon with Daniel's family. They stay just 20 minutes from the camp site. So it was a perfect opportunity to meet them.

Rachel had brought a couple of games to camp specifically for this afternoon, but they got left at camp. So the Sampsons introduced her to one of theirs.

Unfortunately I didn't get photos of the first few minutes when we arrived. Hezekiah was immediately off in a go-cart and they were checking out the "hobbit hole" that Daniel is making out of an old water tank. So here is a photo I took of Daniel's fb page to show you what he is busy with. (Lovely photo Daniel, I hope you don't mind me using it.)

Hezekiah had so much fun. There was a room almost fully dedicated to lego, with many space ships already created. He was so pleased to have some Star Wars fans to play with. They had loads of lightsabers too, so he was very pleased.

I had Asher's bag of toys with. She mostly stuck to her familiar things, but did venture to play with some puzzles and toys that were around.

Hannah was also thrilled to have a fellow Star Wars fan to play with. They had a great time and we hardly saw Hannah the whole time we were there. Other than afternoon tea that is, where we all tried to convince her to try some raw zucchini. She loves raw carrots and celery, so I'm sure she would like it. She wasn't willing to give it a try though. There were plenty of other lovely fresh options though.
Thanks so much Katrina for the lovely dairy and gluten free snack. :-)
Oh - and your strawberries were wonderfully sweet. I can't believe I didn't get to have a look at your vegetable garden. It must be amazing.

The afternoon was too short, but we had to get back to camp for dinner. Now to figure out how to get the families again together to finish some of the conversations that got started. :-)
I had to quickly get my camera out when the children all headed to the gate for our departure. I believe this is a bit of a family tradition - so we enjoyed getting to be a part of it.

Thanks to you all for a great afternoon.
We had to smile when just a couple of minutes after we got back to camp, Daniel arrived. Hezekiah had forgotten his shoes. They had tried to call us, but we didn't have signal. So he brought them. There was plenty of dinner, so he was invited to stay for dinner and the Q&A session that evening.

Monday 6th: After the morning session we did some serious packing. We didn't worry about trying to borrow a van with a trailer this year, and just came in two cars. The van's back seat and boot worked as a trailer. It was well loaded up.

Some last games before lunch.

With the rooms all getting cleaned and the tents all getting packed up, it felt like there were far more children around. It was nice for them to get some last bit of fun together.
Thank you so much to the churches that run this camp for letting us tag along for all these years. It's such a special time for the children to catch up with friends. It's the one time in the year that we put an effort in to get away - and so it's really special. (Getting away has been that much harder over the last 3 years - so it's meant so much more).

I was dreading the trip home without Asher's maracas. Ruth had the idea previously of putting Asher's albums onto a play list. So I set that up on the iPod but realised it doesn't keep the songs in their albums, but creates a new big album with all the songs. This ended up being a perfect solution though. I just put it on shuffle, and it switched between albums and she really enjoyed it. Sometimes she would ask "music please" if she didn't want the current song, and then I would just skip it to the next. We didn't include the album that needs the maracas, and thankfully she didn't even ask for it.

Brendon headed off to karate this evening, so I enjoyed some time playing with Asher while she had a bath. I encouraged her to pour the water over her head and she had a ball.