We're Jason, Beth, Lee Anna, Sawyer, and Sarah Claire, a family of five living, learning, and laughing lots in Northern Africa.
We hope you can learn a little (and maybe laugh a little too) as you read about our latest adventures.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Out-of-Town Adventure, Part VI

Ain't Goin' Down Til' the Sun Comes Up

Now it’s 12:35 a.m., and Lee Anna is just getting ready for bed. How did we get into this absurd position?

At 10:15 each night, they have organized rec time. [Dad, Drew, and anyone else planning a camp for next summer, try writing that into your schedule.] Of course, that is immediately after dinner, so it doesn’t seem so late. When we head to our room at around midnight, they’re still going strong. Meanwhile, there are also kids sacked out everywhere. They just don’t see the need to bother with putting them in a bed. One night, our friend Amal pushed 2 plastic chairs together so each of her boys (ages 6 and 2) could sleep while she and her husband kept playing games. We’ve seen several kids at lunch just lean their heads against the table and go to sleep. On Thursday at lunch, little 10-month-old Julie fell asleep with a bite of food in her mouth. One minute she was eating happily, the next minute she was out cold, right there in her Mama’s lap. That's Julie in the middle picture.


On Friday before we left, they had a “Closing Ceremony” kind of time. At one point during it, we heard several announcements of numbers and lists of people that sounded to us like scores and teams from an ongoing competition. As they called out those names and numbers, our friend turned to us and asked us which team we were on. Clueless, Beth asked, “You mean which study group were we in?” She replied, “No, the teams from all the games every night.” That’s when we first realized we had missed some things by going to our room at midnight. We had no idea what she was talking about.

Also during that last session, they gave out CDs with copies of all the digital pictures people had taken at this event (there were only 4 people with cameras). On Friday evening, after we got home, Beth was looking through them and yelled for me, “Hey! Come look at this!!” So I came running, expecting to see a cute shot that somebody else had taken of Lee Anna in the pool. What she had found was lots of pictures of things we had no idea had taken place. Organized games involving water balloons, blindfolds, and yogurt. We missed all that because we had gone to bed so early with our little kids. AT MIDNIGHT! The games depicted here all took place between 12 and 2:30 a.m.
What doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. We should be pretty strong after all this.

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