The Dennis Family: Texas Spring

Texas is a very hot place. But there are also months of really lovely weather. This year we had an extra long, delicious spring. It only started getting truly hot this week. We had Young Women camp during spring break in March. And we were actually cold!

Young Women camp is a dramatic place. Lots of feelings. There were at least four times where I came across a girl just randomly sobbing. And my cabin had a case of covid, which added to the excitement. Our stake had the YCLs really take charge of planning and running camp. That was awesome! But I think the YCLs perhaps planned too many activities. I think they may have exhausted themselves. Which is a wonderful, leader-y lesson to learn!

It was fun to go to camp with Annie, my main girl. Third year in a row we've been together at camp. Annie has not been to camp without her mother. And I think she's been okay with that.

I was also in charge of the skits at camp. I recruited a friend and fellow leader, Ali, to help me. Our assignment was to make them short and not boring. Doing this was a little trickier than I thought it would be. I brought simple scripts and ideas for the girls to use as a jumping off point. I passed out script options, each group chose one, and we set them loose. But when I went around to check how things were going, it was pretty clear that none of the groups understood why their chosen script was funny. So they changed it to make it more funny (which definitely made it less funny). And they all wanted the skit to end with everyone dying and/or running off stage screaming. Direction was needed! But it was difficult to direct them away from their own ideas and the desire of each individual girl to be "the funny one" instead of working together to make the skit as a whole funny. By helping them, I learned a lot about storytelling, working generously in a group, and what makes something funny or not. And, in the end, they all got it. The audience laughed at the right spots, and they felt successful. They were successful. It was fun!

Springtime also brought an end to our year at CC. We all learned a lot from the experience. And we decided to do it again next year. I especially loved their writing programs. Scotty wrote an end-of-year essay about Shakespeare. Here he is all dressed up.

This is Shakespeare and Ned Kelly together. Zach (under the helmet) and Penny were a kid/mom duo we made friends with this year. They were great (and fellow Latter-day Saint).

Annie's writing program was harder for me to understand. So about 2/3 of the way through the year, I decided to do one of her assignments. I wrote an essay on The Secret Garden. And it changed my perspective of the writing curriculum completely! Now I love it. And understand how to help her with it.

Annie made a skin cake for one of her end-of-year projects. It looked very accurate, which made for an unappetizing cake. She and her friend worked on it for about 8 hours one Saturday. It was difficult to get the hair follicle to look follicle-y instead of fecal-y.

It was wonderful to rub shoulders with all the good folks at Classical Conversations. I was very grateful to be accepted into a Christian group. It has been hard to have so many Christian groups exclude us as non-Christians. It hurts! I get where they're coming from and respect their right to exclude us. But I really feel like I'm a Christian! And I want to connect with fellow believers. I'm so glad someone finally let us in. I learned so much from them. I hope we strengthened each other in Christ.

Scotty also turned 11 this spring. He was in a Rubik's cube lull, so he requested dominoes for his present. But his real present was being taken to an allergist. $662 later, we know that he's allergic to everything except rodents. Which is excellent news for our (not including Aaron) plan to get pet rats. But the most helpful thing about going to the allergist was that she recommended an OTC drug combination that actually relieved Scotty's seasonal allergy symptoms. Xyzal plus Flonase. That's what did it! We are glad Scotty has only been bothered by allergies about six weeks out of the year.