Camp Christensen - Day 7 (Sunday, July 12th)

Sunday was an at home day. Again we anticipated rain but it never really materialized. Our craft project for Saturday was T-shirts. This did not happen on Saturday so it became our first Sunday morning craft project.

Each grandmonster was given a T-shirt and allowed to decorate it as they saw fit. These T-shirts were stretched over a heavy piece of cardboard. Paul, Aubrey and Hayden all started with chalk and drew the pattern they wanted on their T-shirt in chalk. Bailey, love her heart, headed straight for the paint brushes and paint. Of course she was sure to use pink/purple. I'm sure she thinks of this as her favorite color. Paul chose a pattern of a bird head (I think), Aubrey drew a flower, and Hayden went for a huge 'H'. After drawing their pattern in chalk, they each used a bleach pen to draw over their chalk designs. They then followed them up with paints of their choosing. We had cloth paints and puffy paints. You let the T-shirts dry and then wash the ones with the bleach pen individually so the bleach doesn't affect any other fabric. Aubrey used a hair dryer to puff up the puffy paints. All the T-shirts needed to be turned inside out to wash to protect the design and paint work.

Next we took a break for some free play time.

Lunch was really fun. We started by making fruit art to eat. We had grapes, blueberries, strawberries, and honeydew mellon. Each grandmonsters could pick whatever fruit they were going to eat and they each had toothpicks. Then they made whatever they wanted to and at that with their corn dogs.

Then it was time for craft #2 of the day. We made yarn bowls. You take strings of left over yarn in the color of your choice. Paul chose blue & black. Aubrey chose purple. Hayden chose green. Bailey chose pink/purple. We used Pyrex custard dishs as the form. Each grandmonster was given a paper bowl with Elmer's glue covering the bottom. They put their strings of yarn in the glue and covered them with the glue. Then you lay the strings of yarn over the Pyrex bowl mold in any order you want. You let it dry and then pop it off the mold.

We enjoyed a nice Sunday dinner of pot roast, mashed potatos & gravy, peas & carrots and rolls. We had root beer floats for dessert. Papa joined us for the evening. Then it was play time, pack up to go home time, and move down stairs toys back down stairs.

Andie has taken a picture of Claude and I with the kids. I don't have that one yet to add to this history.

Why do Camp Christensen each year? Claude and I always told the grandmonsters that when we retired we would take them for 1 week each summer without parents. As soon as the retirement was official, we began to hear rumblings for the kids about Camp Christensen. They named it and began the questioning process. Each summer since we have retired we have done this week of fun for the kids.

• We try to be sure they have time to build family relationships. This is really important to us since we all live far apart. It is very easy to lose that sense of family unless you work at and make time for it to happen. We want this set of cousins to know each other and love each other.
• Then we want to create opportunities to learn new things. We try and have outings to museums or nature centers or other cities to learn something. We also try to have crafts that little hands can learn to build something they will enjoy for a long time to come.
• We also have fun games. You have seen some of them in the blogs. Jeopardy has always been a staple until this year. With the age differences, we just didn't get to Jeopardy as we have done in the past. This year we didn't get to do some of the games like broom ice hockey (I had dust pans, dust brooms and ice cubes to do this), colored ice cubes that would melt in the wading pool (Due to the forecast of storms each day we never filled the big wading pool), learning to spell your name in sign language, bubbles (I had a bottle & wand for each child) and making a puppet show (we made the puppet stuff and will use it in the future). We never get to everything we have supplies for. But we can always use that in future visits.

It is a lot of work, time, and money but the end result--the memories and the building of family are so worth all of those fleeting things. Claude and I truly love each of these cherubs we call grandmonsters. They each have their own wonderful personalities. We are very blessed to be in a position to do this each summer.