This past weekend, I was a counselor on the Fourth Presbyterian Church Junior High Winter Blow Out Weekend Ski Retreat (how's THAT for a mouthful?) in northern Maryland and southern Virginia. Is was, well, wow. Insane, but I learned a lot about myself, too. Why don't I jsut tell it like it happened?

Friday
6:00AM - I wake up, 13 minutes before my alarm goes off. I never do that. I can't go back to sleep. I'm nervous.

1:30PM
I arrive at church, ready to go. The kids won't start coming until 3, and most not until 3:30, but we have a lot of work to do before then. Shirts to get ready, signs to put up, all kinds of last minute details to arrange. At 2:00, most of the counselors get here, and we have a meeting - last minute details to go over and prayer for the weekend. Most of the counselors are colelge students, but there are 8 of us seniors - 5 guys and 3 girls. I'm good friends with both of the other girls going, and with one of the guys - being OneStaple. We have been, however, warned not to spend time with each other, any of the seniors... they want us to be with the kids, which makes sense. When I see One, the past 2 weeks of getting over him get squashed flat pretty quickly. Oh well, I'll have to survive.

3:00PM
For the next 45 minutes or so, it is pandemonium as kids arrive and we get all of them signed in, plastered with a name tag, and given a team shirt. The competition this weekend will be the skiers versus the snowboarders - I'm a skier. Woohoo, skier power! I find one of the girls in my room - Lauren - pretty early on. All four of my girls are in the seventh grade. Another girl, Katy, arrives pretty shortly after. I find out that Lucy isn't coming after all, and Karen is getting driven to the retreat later on.

4:00PM
All of us get herded to the front of the room, where the retreat rally starts - although for us counselors, it "starts when the first kid arrives and isn't over until the last kid leaves". The team leaders are introduced and we're given instructions for what to do once we arrive, and we're sent to the busses. My two girls and I, along with Kristin (One's little sister, good friends with my girls, and all around a great kid), get on bus #1 and sit together. We're headed to Hagerstown, MD, which shouldn't be more than an hour away. We don't leave until at least 4:30, and it takes us an hour and a half at least to get there. Traffic is horrible - it is rush hour leaving DC, after all. But it's a lot of fun to get to know my girls. They aren't the type I was really friends with when I was in junior high - more the popular, cutesy type - but ehy, I never tried to get to know any of that type back then, and I'm older, and I'm a counselor. Any which way, I think my girls are the greatest.

6:00PM
...or thereabouts, we get to our hotel. I pick up our keys, we find our room, change into our team shirts, and head straight to the Upper Learning Center, where all of our games for the weekend are to be held. Tonight we make up a team cheer (Skiers win!!), play a game called pull-apart, which is hard to explain - but the Boarders win that, so it doesn't matter, and another game involving corn-sacks (smaller than potato ones) and lots of mayhem and kids jumping around. The Boarders win that too, but we have plenty of time to make a come back.

7:30PM
Our first meeting. We sing songs, there are some crazy skits, and the first talk. Jim Byrne, the youth pastor at our church, is giving the talks this weekend.... tonight he just rather introduces the idea of Christ, surrounded by some stories and stuff. These retreats really are geared towards non-believers. Towards the beginning of the talk, Jim, who knows some of the vague One-and-me topics but none of the real details, just joking around says "Lynette came on this retreat looking for a boyfriend. She requested anyone but [OneStaple]. [OneStaple], on the other hand, hasn't noticed girls yet.... so if the guys in his room want to explain things to him, they should feel free." This ruins all chances of not having to explain ourselves 50 times over this weekend.

9:00PM
Crazy huge insane pool party. Imagine one pool, medium size-ish, with 100 people in it at least. Yeah, that about sums it up. Anyway, this is a lot of fun. Crossing from one end of the pool to the other is almost a suicide mission. At one point, One dunks my sister, who is an 8th grader and on the retreat, underwater. She hates being dunked, so of course I attack (along with about 5 other girls) with a vengeance. We never actually get him, but it's an excuse for a lot of splish-splashy fun. At the very end, Karen arrives, but the party is just over anyway, so she doesn't bother to change or anything.

10:00PM
We head back to our rooms. I take a shower, and we all hang out for a while. Karen seems like a lot of fun too, and much more the kind of girl that I am, and was friends with when I was in junior high. I spend a bit more time with her, hoping she won't feel left out because she missed the beginning, but she's also good friends with the other girls in our room, so it's cool. They make me tell them the entire OneStaple story, and I oblige, getting it down to probably about 5 or 10 minutes, amazingly enough.

10:30PM
We have our first Small Group - a time for the room to just come together and talk about some things. Tonight we just discuss what we're looking forward to over the weekend.

11:00PM
Official lights out, although our lights go out a bit later than that, and we talk for a while after. Lauren starts talking about her boy problems, and I go into full swing counselor mode... I don't really think 7th grade girls need boyfriends, etc. etc.... and Karen agrees with me, so it sounds an awful lot like we're siding against Lauren. I don't think it's that big of a deal though... we move on to other subjects, and go to sleep after not too long. I have to get up really early the next morning.

Anyway, I'm tired now, so I'll stop there and continue my weekend later on...

Kiki"world traveller"pegette