So Long Sweet Summer (Once Again)

This week marked the unofficial end of our summer season here at Lost Canyon.

Praise the Lord: it's over.

Praise the Lord: it was good.

Here's the thing about sticking something out for more than a year: it gets easier. Because you figure out what you're doing. And you do the same thing again, but better.

It's pretty great.

And I don't remotely know how to recap it all for you, so I'll just caption some pictures that pretty much say it all.

First Session: Life is awesome and YL summer is in full gear. My job includes teaching the high school girls in the picture below how to clean things and dressing up with them in ridiculous costumes in order to make cleaning things fun. I'm in the parrot costume.

The weather is like this, pretty much always. Except ignore those clouds because they don't really happen here.

Once a week, there's a cabin clean-up competition and we award a prize to the cleanest cabin. Bribes are allowed. The bribes consist of pretty much this amount of candy every week.

Session Two: We got a little tired. This is Susie, Debbie, and Abigail (left to right) at the session start meeting. My instruction for this photo was "accurately represent how you feel about the fact that Session Two starts right now." I'm going to let you guess which two people in this picture work for me and which one works in the kitchen.

I did find some time to relax. When I did, it consisted of this:

4th of July: Capernaum (YL for kids with special needs) Week at Lost Canyon. We had a parade. It was awesome. See this post for video.

I also went to the Williams Parade. Which featured Lady Liberty and Uncle Sam. I love this town.

Also there: this cute baby. Whom I love.

And this one, who was really focused on his snow cone. And whom I also love. (This is before he ditched us to sit by himself on a curb.)

This summer was so awesome that I actually got to take a week off from working at Young Life camp to... take kids to Young Life camp! Yep, I got to hang out with these kids for a week at Woodleaf. They're real fun.

I spent the week laughing a lot like this:

And getting caked in head-to-toe mud like this:

And swinging in trees like this (yes, I'm a grown-up):

After that awesome week, I came back to work where I sometimes find things like this drawn on the bottom of Lost and Found shoes. High school kids are funny (and inappropriate).

And now summer has ended, so I get to do things like play in giant birthday softball games with my friends. Again, awesome.

So basically, I spent my summer hanging out with high school kids. And acting like a high school kid. And being awesome.

Such is my life.