Grammie Camps

Before I share some of the fun at Grammie Camps this year, I have to say how much we missed our Jonah and Aja Family who are pretty much covering the earth in Europe this summer. Aniston, their soon-to-be 14 year old daughter sent us a terrific video of the things they were doing while we were rollicking at Bear Lake. As you can see, there is quite a lot of interest in the video, especially from 2 year old Zara in the front!

Also before we start, I have to say that these darling little children take such great care of their Grammie. As mentioned earlier, the plan to keep me from helping with the clean-ups after dinner, the kids took turn giving me foot rubs. Such heavenly little hands! It worked!

And as mentioned in an earlier post, the Grandchildren don’t come to Grammie Camp until they are five but I did have a fun little Grammie Party with the preschoolers who were thrilled with a few bubbles and a fun little craft!

So these are our darling teenagers!  How did that happen?  As you might notice, one is taller than the others….and ready to be off to college for a semester and then a mission for our church. We’re going to miss Max the next two years. This is his last official Grammie Camp. (sigh)

It was so fun watching these big kids doing a dance to the Grammie Camp song they have been singing since they were little, pouring out their favorite scriptures they have learned them word perfect and are ready to take them into their futures,  and learning more about the ancestors who brought us to this beautiful area. Their graves are just across the lake.

They did a good job on the Classical Music Challenge that we did this year (details on that later in this post) even though Elle (on the left) had just flown in from an Internship for a design company in London, where she had lived with a wonderful family for all of June. And Max had just flown in from the National Volleyball Tournament with a silver medal for a prize. Yup his team won second place of about 50 teams! How we missed Ana this year!

We did a double whammy this year and broke for the day after an overnighter and rejoined that evening for hamburgers at Merlin’s on our way to our traditional favorite melodrama at the Pickleville Playhouse in Garden City on the other side of the lake. This show is created every year by a brilliant guy who must have majored in “funny”…. the famous Bandito. The show, once again, did not disappoint! 

Elle made me be in one of the pictures to prove that I was there.

I don’t know what I would have done without Josh’s help this year! This is group Four. Even though we missed Camden so much, we had addition this year. Jacobson, (my maiden name) better known as Cubby, turned five this year and joined the fun! After they came to up to the Lighthouse for the traditional, talent show, scripture prizes, and ancestor stories, and the Classical Music Challenge, Josh took them (for the second year) to the sailboat for a fabulous sleep-over that included a lesson on the blazing stars in the sky. Josh is brilliant with astronomy and there’s nothing like learning about what one is seeing while gazing into the sky blazing with the billions of stars directly overhead! They also watched a terrific documentary on Josh’s computer. Thanks Josh!  

Josh also was invaluable in showing both the boys and the girls’ groups how to make rockets. He does this with his school kids every year and I decided that it would be fun for both the girls and the boys Grammie Campers this year.  I think they are pretty excited about this! Even though we lost one rocket overnight in the sagebrush, we were able to retrieve it the next morning.

By the time we got to the girls’ Grammie Camp, Josh had to go back to work in AZ but luckily Eli figured out how to get the girls’ rockets up in the air!

The girls’ groups combined this year, although we had a few hours with each group individually, joined for the first part with a couple of visiting cousins. “The Babes”,  Claire, Eliza and Hazel had a pretty great time together this year! 

 

And these “Princesses” (minus our darling Elsie whom we missed)  had a ball bonding and being together since it only happens once a year! Lyla is from Orange County, Emmeline, from Boston and Lucy from AZ. And we missed that cute Elsie who was in Bavaria/Germany/Switzerland…somewhere there in Europe!

The first project for this group was getting our old couch and chair to a Thrift Store in Montpelier. The kids had quite a great time getting it there (the boys, who had helped load the couch and chair just couldn’t resist being a part of the fun for a few minutes). We visited the cemetery where my parents and grandparents and many family members are buried on the way back.

Here are the girls working on their rockets. They were pretty proud of themselves!  And I was pretty grateful for Josh!

Part of the girls’ Grammie Camp is always dressing up and dancing! We had a bug going through the family, usually attacking one at a time but two of these girls weren’t feeling well…as you can tell by Lucy’s face (poor girl) and Hazel was trying to be brave, they were both afflicted! 

Throughout she remained brave!!!

The other four carried on with their dance routines…and then….after sunset…

…..We had Grammie’s Classical Music Challenge. Several months earlier, Saydi had encouraged me to send out clips of my favorite classical music (I was a music major in college) and challenge the kids to listen until they could recognize them to be tested at Grammie Camp. I made a play list of 20 of my favorite pieces on Spotify and sent it all the Grammie Campers’ moms. The moms managed to get the list on their phones and in their cars and lots of those cute kids were listening until the last minute before “the test” at Grammie Camp.

To make it compelling, there was a financial reward for 1) knowing the piece, 2) knowing the composer and 3) knowing something else about the piece (i.e. what period it was written, why it was written etc). Some couldn’t write very well yet so the older kids took notes for them. Lucy, who had a fever and was feeling terrible shouted out the ones she knew from the couch. Here is a view of their score sheets. Each has its own personality.

Ten-year-old Hazel managed to get every single one right plus including the extra points! Six year old Emmeline did a good job and did the best she could on spelling! Everyone had so much fun!

The next morning we had a nice breakfast together and had fun talking about the ancestor tree that they helped to make last summer.

 

 

They loved seeing themselves on the branches. Every year they can recognize and tell more stories about the people in the roots of this tree who helped make them who they are!

 

 

After feeding the horses a few carrots, the finale was flying those rockets on The Grandchildren’s Green. And we bid a fond farewell to another year of Grammie Camps!