Girls Camp Speaker

We've been home for a week now. It's good to be back. I can't say that we're back into a routine quite yet. Before I left, I was asked to speak at Girls Camp on three different days this week. So, a lot of my time since I got back has been spent on preparing that talk, driving 50 minutes to camp, giving the talk, agonizing over what went wrong, making changes to the talk, etc. Phew. It has been exhausting. My first session was with the 14-15 year old girls. It went ok, but not as well as I hoped. The second session was with the 12-13 year old girls and it was even worse. I was beginning to doubt my abilities as a teacher and public speaker. Am I really that boring? Did I have NO inspiration when I prepared this talk? Today I taught the 16-17 year old girls. The third time was a charm. I felt like it went really well. The girls were much more interactive and things just seemed to flow more smoothly. I was thankful that it ended on a good note.

And I was really thankful to have three good friends who watched my kids each morning for 3 1/2 hours. What a huge blessing. And my kids were sad each time when I came to pick them up because they wanted to stay and play more. Now that's the sign of a good babysitter. (Or maybe I really AM that boring!)

It has also been fun to catch up with some of our friends that we really missed while we were gone. On Tuesday, we met two of them at the water park and played for a couple of hours. That place is always fun, but it's even funner with friends.

Andrew is off to the same Girls Camp tonight to bring them a pizza dinner and give a Family Home Evening lesson to them. So, the kids and I have decided that we'll have movie night. We're watching Aladdin. Should be fun.

Oh, and I never really posted about the last two days of the road trip. They were pretty good. We ended up driving through St. Louis, which I didn't realize we were going to do. We HAD to stop at the arch since we'd never been there. The kids and I took a "tram" up to the top. It was a fun experience. It's kind of claustrophibic once you're up there--not a lot of room to move around. But it was cool to see Busch stadium out of the windows.

Here's Brandon, 630 feet up!

Me and a hard-to-photograph Whitney

We stayed the last night in Louisville, KY with Andrew's Aunt Stephanie and Uncle Alex and their kids. It was fun to visit with them, even though it was short.

The very last day of driving was when I finally got tired of being in the car. Whitney was still a really good girl. My mom and I still got along. (Phew!) But I had no patience with Brandon and he was done being in the car, too. We were both VERY excited to get home and see Andrew and sleep in our own beds. His first question when he saw how close we were to home, "Mom, can I go outside and play baseball in the backyard?" I thought that was so cute. I guess that's what he missed the most.