So how amazing are Jr high kids? Truly amazing. They can also be utterly exhausting with their high amounts of energy though too. Karl and I finished up a week of camp up near Scranton, PA yesterday and it was a great week. We took 2 jr high boys of our own as well as 1 sr high girl leader and 3 sr high worship teamers. We were all looking forward to this week for quite awhile because it’s so much fun. This year we had this amazing balance between “team time” where we spent most of the time between breakfast and lunch in our teams learning about the Bible together as well as working on projects like a team logo, a commercial and an infomercial. (At this point I should point out our theme was JHC-TV (jr high camp-tv) and we based it around a lot of the fun tv shows out there. The teams were split up into NBC, ABC and CBS so thats where the logo, commercial and infomercial come into play.) So anyway yeah tons of team time which was great and then every evening we’d have 1 or 2 games to play for points. Games such as Dodgeball, Ultimate Basketball (a bit of a twist on basketball), Floor Hockey, Find the Leaders, Scavenger Hunts, MESSY GAMES and all sorts of other small things throughout the week. My team (ABC) kept them selves at a steady pace and we came in 2nd place for most of the events and ended the whole week in 2nd place. They were great kids, awkward at times of course, but they were great and worked well as a team.
Messy Games tends to be the highlight of the kids week, and this year I think it was the highlight of my week as well. I went into messy games thinking “last year I really didn’t get very messy, lets try that again this year…” but I was wrong… Now you may be asking what do you mean by “Messy Games” well… a camp staffer asked me the same thing this week and here’s the run down.
We started with a balloon toss, pretty simple huh?… thing is the balloons were filled with ketchup, mustard, relish and horseradish. Kids were definately splatterred by the time that game was over. But that was only the beginning. Now this is how the next part panned out… see we could only have 5 teams for the balloon toss so we had one kid sit out as well as Matt, my other leader and I. Now for the next game you needed 2 people that weren’t a part of the first event to have their hair sculpted with shaving cream. So our one girl that sat out the first game was ready, but then it was between Matt and I who had to have their hair sculpted and the kids decided on me since matt’s hair is pretty short. So at this point I knew I was going to get messy… I had a full can of shaving cream emptied onto my head and sculpted into what they called the “Beth Sundae” they then proceeded to throw cheeseballs at my head to see how many they could stick to it. Now I’ll brag a little because my team came in first place for their hair designs… not so much for the amount of cheese balls, but that’s ok… they were great artistically.
After this wonderful game we lined up as teams and had to pass balloons from person to person down the field without popping them. This is the game where the last person has to run to the front and you just keep moving down the field… and when you get to the end we had to pop the balloons we had left on top of our heads. Well I shouldn’t say ours, because thankfully I didn’t have a balloon in my hand! So I got out of that mess because again there was ketchup, mustard, relish and horseradish inside the balloons. I did get a nice spray of relish though from the boy beside me.
Next the kids split up into girls and boys and they had to try and catch flying diapers filled with chocolate pudding or the specialty: mayonaise, horseradish and pudding. These were sent flying with water balloon launchers. Theres nothing better then seeing a kid catch a diaper that just errupts with chocolate pudding in their face! They got pretty gross during this game, though the girls had a tough time catching the diapers. We followed this game up with a race to pop balloons. The kids sat around a tarp and were given numbers, so that when their number was called they had to run out into the field and pick up a balloon filled with shaving cream bring it back to the tarp and pop it with their butt. This got to be quite funny as the tarps got more and more slippery with shaving cream, added mayonaise and added chocolate pudding. We then ended the games with another balloon race up the field with again those 4 types of balloons except at the end of this one we had to smash the balloon on our teams tarp and then EVERYONE had to roll through the tarp with all its nastiness on it and added reslish, mayo and whatever else was left over. It was pretty messy. As I hosed down after the games I kept finding relish on me… weird. So THAT is what messy games were and the kids had a blast. Its amazing to watch them not worrying about how they looks and trying their best to win these games. I hope to find some pictures from this day because wow we looked AMAZING… Camp was great! Sorry I couldn’t post through out the week, but internet wasn’t very readily available which is fine… it’s camp!