The Saturday 7

1. We survived another year of Soccer Camp!

It was definitely our hottest year yet. Temps in the 90s every day had us finding creative solutions to keep kids cool. We bought a couple of misting fans, held our lessons inside, encouraged water breaks, and ended up buying each coach a spray bottle so they could spray kids with water throughout the night. Kind of like cats. Haha. I bought Lena and Levi neck fans. Lucy and I stayed inside the church as much as possible. And Justin is tougher than all of us.

2. I had fewer responsibilities than usual, since I delegated a couple things after stressing myself out last year. I'm still the content, marketing, and communication girl, though. I made all kinds of handouts and flyers and whatnot, then spent a good deal of time with the paper cutter in the office. Levi actually came to help me and insisted on using the paper cutter. Sometimes I get sick of arguing and figure, "if he chops off a finger, hopefully he'll learn his lesson."

3. I watched my niece on Tuesday as usual.

Good old fashioned stare-down with Stella

I ended up not having any kids on Wednesday. Lucy and Lena had plans with their friends, so Levi and I went to see the new Minions movie. It was pretty dumb, but he enjoyed it.

And it was nice and cool in the theater!

The heat was seriously oppressive most of the week. As usual, our poor AC can't keep up. I keep it at 77 or 78 because it kicks on at 10 a.m. and doesn't turn off until after midnight. Ain't nobody can afford that much electricity!

4. Wednesday night at Soccer Camp, it started to get kind of smoky - we watched the sun turn red, then disappear behind the clouds of ash. But the air quality wasn't horrible, so we carried on. We had a brief discussion about what to do if the smoke got worse on Thursday, but left it at, "We'll go on as planned and let parents decide what they're comfortable with." But then Thursday dawned smokier than any of us had imagined. (Context for the future: wildfires in Minnesota/Canada) News stations and social media sites were rife with warnings that the air quality had reached hazardous levels, and no one should be outside - especially doing any kind of physical activity. 🤦

I met at church with the administrative team at 10 to decide what we were going to do. Thursday is always our last night of camp, and none of us wanted to cancel outright. But that left us with some major changes to make in order to move camp inside. Trevor had the brilliant idea to do human foosball, Jessie, Missy, and Angela worked feverishly to rearrange the schedule and find a place for everyone in the building, we all contacted our team members with the new plan, and I worked on emailing parents, making facebook posts, and updating a whole lot of signage. I was also tasked with finding 26 pool noodles for human foosball. Mission accomplished!

I also had to drive half an hour to the second-closest Walmart in order to pick up the prints I made of our team photos. (The first-closest Walmart doesn't do one hour photo. 😠) I actually didn't even go home before Soccer Camp started. Got to church at 10, ran errands and grabbed myself lunch, straight back to church where I worked feverishly until I left at 9:30 p.m. Whew!

5. Our whole team performed phenomenally under pressure and we were able to whip out an incredible indoor-version of soccer camp in 8 hours. Human foosball was so fun (and there were lots of God moments involved in how easily we found the materials - one guy from our church just happens to work for a rope company, and he donated a spool of rope; another guy just bought a house from the Amish and has been removing pieces of PVC piping for weeks - exactly the amount we needed). Our amazing set-up team came in early to help Trevor put it all together, and all of our volunteers pivoted seamlessly into the new plan. In that original 10:00 meeting, we anticipated a significant dip in attendance numbers, but when everything was added up that night we realized that we were only down 7 campers from the night before!!

Apparently I only took one picture of our foosball setup, but this is the Youtube link that inspired us. We had two complete "courts" in our gym and sanctuary.

We quickly improvised to include our traditional pie-ing of the winning team's coaches. The tarp did a decent job of protecting the floor, and I only had to clean up a couple pie splatters on the steps and the piano (shhhhh).

I got home that night feeling like I had run a marathon (ha! like I have any idea what that feels like!), so I was delighted to collapse on the couch and stuff my face with ice cream.

6. Now that the Fireworks Tent and Soccer Camp are done, I have about two weeks before I have to dive into Back to School prep. Summer is flying, and I'm feeling a ton of guilt for not being super-present with my kids. So I think we're going to go screen free this week. They're going to be so excited. 😂 I really do try to limit their screen time during the week, but when I'm busy - or out of the house - they default to rotting in front of their screens. And I hate it. I've done so much research about how screens are destroying kids' brains and childhoods, but their siren song is too strong for me to resist. Alas, resist I shall. Wish us luck!

7. Pics and memes

One of the first years we did Soccer Camp, Niki was Lena's coach: