Summer 2010

This summer has been much busier than normal for me.  Usually, my family will go camping once or twice during the summer, and occasionally we have taken a "real" vacation, such as going to South Dakota or visiting out-of-state cousins.  I don't usually go anywhere on my own, however, or at least I didn't until a few months ago.  I was planning on blogging about each of my trips, but when I got back I had told the stories so many times to all of my family members that I didn't really want to write them up again!  As you may have noticed, I seem to have this problem where I feel like I should blog about a certain event, so I don't blog about anything else until I have finished the "required" post. :)  This has certainly been the case with my summer!  But I feel like it can't go completely unrecorded, so here is a short summary of my life for the past couple months:

Schoenstatt High School camp began my summer, and I can't think of a better way it could have started!  We put on a camp for Hispanic kids who live in the area during the afternoons and prepped for it in the morning.  Every day with the kids ended with water games, and at the end of the week we had a family picnic which concluded with a water fight that I believe I could describe as a water war.  I also learned a lot and was very inspired by the week!

A week after Schoenstatt I went on S.W.I.M.  This was such a great experience!  Every day was different, and everything that we did was really fun, whether it was cleaning at a home that houses new migrants temporarily, collecting food for their food shelf, swimming, or having "intense prayer" nights.  Since I haven't been on any other missions I can't say for sure whether or not it has prepared me well for them, but I know that S.W.I.M. has certainly helped my relationship with God and I am sure that I will be happy for the experience should I chose to go on other missions.

My last trip this summer - helping out on the 7th grade campout! - was not really a "trip" per se, but I was gone from Monday to Thursday, so I think it counts. :)  I was on the "Eyes" team (aka, music) and I enjoyed it immensely!  This year was the first time I could help out, and I hope to do this again for the next couple years!

So, there is the away-from-home summary of my summer.