Eleven.

Eleven is one less than twelve.

We are ONE month away from twelve months. My mind is having a hard time processing that.

We've had an eventful 11th month.

We went to church camp at Wesley Woods (more info on that in some other posts!)

We found out that we are moving to Oklahoma in about 3 short months.
Evelyn is SO close to walking. She practically jumps around when she is walking with us. She might just start running.
Speaking of running, she turbo crawls everywhere. Usually straight to the stairs that she recently discovered. She had never climbed them before and one day, she sprinted toward them and crawled right up the flight of stairs. I couldn't stop her because I couldn't quite believe my eyes.

We have embraced the "duck face" as one of Evelyn's favorite faces to make at people. 

She's pretty cute, even with a duck face! 

While at camp, my fellow co-nurse Judy, was the Labor & delivery nurse who helped deliver Evelyn. She was the one who initially took care of her, assessed her, and helped Jordan give Evelyn's first bath. She also scrubbed my sweet baby's head because of all the gunk that was stuck in her mounds of hair! It was great to see her and have time with somebody who is so fantastic and is such apart of our family story! 

 Evelyn is becoming a toddler, and a funny little girl. Her personality is continuing to make us laugh and love every minute with her. She is cuddly when she wants to be, and sassy when she wants something. She likes to study things around her, put things together and try to take things apart. She loves being around people and knows how to charm those around her. 

She truly lights up the room. 

Our days our getting busier with playing & swinging outside while chasing a turbo-crawling 11 month old around, but I wouldn't have it any other way. 

Here's to 11 months in the books, and hoping and praying this last month of my baby being a baby goes slowly so I can cherish every moment. 

Looking back on a great week

So another week is ending here at Wesley Woods and what an amazing, love filled week it has been. New friendships have been made and the love of Jesus has been spread to 150 campers and to 40+ staff members. I am in constant awe of how amazing this place becomes for so many of us. There is a draw that keeps us coming back. I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly it is this week, but I haven’t found the answer yet. I have been to this camp as a middle school camper,  a middle school camp nurse, and now a high school camp nurse. I feel like I have grown so much as an adult from when I first started as the camp nurse, that is seems like I was two different people. Seeing the younger staff members here this week makes me realize how much my life has truly changed. Maybe it’s the baby who has really changed me (which is probably the case) but either way, I have grown so much over the last 8 years.

This week was different for me in that I had the baby with me, and no back-up baby sitter. Many times when there is a baby here, there is somebody who is here just for the baby and doesn’t have any responsibilities for camp or campers. I didn’t have the luxury this year because nobody could come spend a week here in the woods! I knew we would be fine because Evelyn is pretty easy-going and really happy and we don’t have THAT MUCH responsibility as the nurse when it comes to being places and participating in activities. That being said, I don’t feel as though I could be apart of camp as much as I normally am. I participated when I could and Evelyn and I joined in as often as possible. By the end of the week, we had a pretty good routine down.

It was especially cool here this week because I got to see some of my old middle school campers here as high schoolers.  Many of them I didn’t always see in the nurses cabin as middle schoolers, but I would see them at activities and get to know them at meal times. I saw some familiar names on the camp list this year and I was excited to see these campers grown up! It is really special to see these kids growing up and enjoying camp the way that I enjoyed it. Probably the coolest thing this year was getting to experience this place with high schoolers that are almost adults (& some already are) and are facing real troubles in their daily lives, and seeing the emotions and the relief & hope this week gives them. If this one week can impact them for the better, we did our job this week. We impact their lives by building relationships, giving unconditional love and having a whole lot of fun.

We did a color run game one night which was so much fun! It down-poured that night and helped make the activity even more crazy than it already was. Imagine 150+ people in mostly white t-shirts, throwing colored cornstarch on each other in the pouring rain in the middle of a big open field. It was all sorts of crazy, but it was amazing. Chapel was great, as  always the music was rockin’ and we had a great time. I’m sad I didn’t get to experience firebowl  here at high school camp, but I know this isn’t my last year here and I will get to have that experience another year.

We had not one – but TWO dress up nights. Thursday night at our cookout we dressed as our favorite characters from movies. I didn’t have much time to put together an outfit, so Evelyn and I were super-nurses. Kinda lame, but at least we had outfits! Friday night is the senior send-out night and we dress up in nice clothes and have previous campers come back and serve everyone our meal at dinner. Everyone looked so great in their dress clothes. Some of the boy campers had some seriously nice suits on, and the girls had great (camp appropriate) dresses!

One of my final memories from this week is that of the affirmation circle. All the love and affirmation give here in this place by people who were strangers at the beginning of the week is incredible. I didn’t think I would be able to be apart of the circle time tonight because of Evelyn’s sleep schedule, but by a camper with a headache, I was able to come down and have my moments of affirmation. Four minutes of people coming up and telling you what an amazing person you are fills you with such unending joy its hard to put into words. We do not acknowledge all the wonderful things people do for us in our lives enough, and it was so great to have that time tonight. The bonds formed here are like no other. Its been an amazing week.

It was great to be experience this with Evelyn, in this place that means so much to me, for the first year of many years to come.

First full day at camp - with a baby!

Monday has been a much smoother day. We’ve had our share of little bumps along the way, but we are figuring it out. Meal time is going great. Her high chair attachment works really well and she loves being around all the campers! We are in the smaller “VIP” section so it isn’t so overwhelming with half the camp looking at her all the time. She is loving it. Every single minute has been good from her standpoint I think. Expcept her afternoon nap today – one of the maintence guys was fixing the roof and was nainling and pounding and she didn’t exactly sleep right through all that. But she got 45 minutes, and we rolled with it, went swimming and had a great afternoon.

I am kinda wishing she didn’t take two naps at this point. Its taking a lot of time away from all the activities at camp and its hard to get to know people and get involved with stuff (like I like to do) when I’m always up at the cabin with a sleeping baby. Don’t get me wrong – I love how she sleeps and gives us 2 naps a day still, but I would like to be able to participate more than I can right now. And the stinky thing about this being a high school camp and everyone being able to stay up later is that evening activity doesn’t even start until around 730-8 and that is when Evelyn starts to melt and really needs to be heading towards bed. So more time for me to miss out. But again – its all good. I am here at one of my favorite places,  spending a week with my daughter and loving meeting all these new campers, counselors and I know that each day is going to get easier. 

Wesley Woods High School Camp

I had the opportunity to be one of the camp nurses at the most amazing church camp last week. I wrote about our week, but had bad internet connection and couldn't upload to the blog! So here it is.. my week at Wesley Woods! 

So night one of camp isn’t exactly going as smoothly as I envisioned. I got to camp much earlier than I thought I would…yay! About 7:30. But I was thinking I could probably get her right to bed, but that really wasn’t the case. I needed to put some stuff away and get some stuff accessible to me once Evelyn fell asleep. And my co-nurse was doing nurs-y things and I felt bad that I wasn’t helping out. Well it turns out I probably should have just focused on the baby because by the time I got her bottle going and she took it, she was a mess. And I mean a mess. Aching, screaming, thrashing, all of the above. I was in tears right along with her. We tried side-to-side rocking on a little school chair and that wasn’t working. Campers kept coming in for water, that wasn’t helping. Thankfully my co-nurse has the amazing zero gravity camping chairs and I slid one into my back bedroom and laid back with Evelyn and tried to rock her to sleep that way. It worked. For now. The campers should be coming back from firebowl any minute now and I am just waiting. I have a sign outside that says “please be mindful that there is a baby sleeping in this cabin, Thank you *huge smiley face*” We’ll see. Big mom fail…forgot the sound machine, so I currently have a box fan blowing around our room, which is sort of nice, but sort of cold for a baby who doesn’t like to stay under covers and mom decided to dress in a short/t-shirt pj combo because it was ‘warm’ tonight. I might wake up to a baby with frostbite, buuuut, we’lll make it through the night – hopefully.

I’m looking forward to getting to know the counselers here. Or hopefully get to know them. I feel really alone right now, but I can handle that, I’m sure it will get better. I’m usually good at making some friends. But what is hard to deal with is not quite knowing really anybody here and being the nurse. I mean I’ve done this camp nursing thing for 7 years now – this year 8. I know what I’m doing, but its just with new people and I want to learn some of their new ways, and I’m trying to show them some of mine. And I know that there are some campers who loooove being with the nurses. I’m not so into that. You’re here for camp, not to hang out with the “cool nurse.” And this year, it will probably be worse because I have a baby with me. Hopefully we can keep the campers focused on camper things and we can make this all go really, really smoothly!

Camp is such an amazing place and I am excited to experience it with new people, new schedules, my little baby & I hope I can help pass on an amazing camp experience to 150+ campers!