So, for those of you keeping track: the first weekend of summer vacation Craig and I took a van-full of youth camping in Palmyra. The second weekend of summer vacation, Craig took all the Young Men camping in Richmond. So then obviously, the third weekend of summer vacation was my turn to take all the Young Women camping, this time in West Virginia. So much camping!!! And our poor van is so gross now!!!
Trying to figure out what to do for our High Adventure Young Women's Conference was such a challenge for me. I'm really no good at coming up with this stuff and just preferred getting to ride on the coattails of whatever Craig planned for the youth. But the stake didn't seem to like us having the boys and girls combined, so we decided we probably needed to do separate activities this summer. (And come up with new names, too! We finally dubbed ours "S'more Sisters!") I first reached out to the Franklin Ward's YWs president in West Virginia, hoping we could combine with them and then maybe she'd do most of the grunt work and I could just show up? (This is basically how our youth went spelunking back in 2022!) But the Franklin YWs president is just as overwhelmed as I am, and we never quite managed to get our act together. She had the idea to go to the Sinks of Gandy (which TOTALLY sounds like something out of Lord of the Rings, right???), but by the time I was ready to book a campsite, they were all taken. And even though it looks very cool, we weren't exactly sure that this was something we needed to spend a weekend doing, either. Also, a lot of our YW are terrified of caves and water, so they were pretty uneasy about this. It just wasn't meant to be.
With very little time left to plan anything at all, I freaked out and decided to go back to Ace again, like we did in 2023. We didn't have nearly the budget money like we'd had before, so this was more like Ace Lite, but I was pretty sure we could still manage to make it work. And by "we" I mean my wonderful secretary Wendy, who did ALL the work of calling Ace and getting quotes and changing those quotes about a billion times as we kept changing what we wanted to do and who was coming. I really cannot thank Wendy enough-- she is the person who really made this happen. I just had to be the person to make all the final decisions. Which also kind of sucked.
Planning it went something like this: we would agree on something (on Saturday morning, we'll hike to Finn's Falls!) only for someone to object (it will be too hot!) and suggest something else (why don't we just go to Ace's water park?) and figure out what that would cost but then everyone else would be lukewarm about that idea (the water park wasn't actually that great) so we couldn't really agree on what to do, so then we'd ask the class presidency what they wanted to do, but they couldn't decide either, so we'd ask all the girls, but still no real consensus there, either, until I finally would decide for everyone (we're just going to do the hike because it seems stupid to spend more money on something no one really wants, and besides, we're hiking to a waterfall, so who cares if it's hot?). And that was kind of EVERYTHING went.
The whole thing was SO STRESSFUL for me. And then we had a girl get added just a week before, which meant we no longer fit in two rafts, so that made it quite a bit more expensive. And then the day before, another girl's mom decided she "didn't feel good about it," so we lost all the money we'd spent on her... It was hard for me to not be really angry about stuff like that.
The saving grace in it all was the morning I got a phone call from a member of the high council asking to meet with me. And that's when I learned that I was being called as a seminary teacher. Which meant-- after two years and a handful of months-- I could look forward to being released as YWs president very, very soon. So I gritted my teeth and tried to make this the best camp out ever, knowing that it would hopefully be the last one that *I* had to plan.
{Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.}
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