Camp!

Camp this year was one of my favorite years! I made so many new friends and had so much fun this year. This year, I wrote down notes on what I wanted to talk about, which means that this post is going to be really long. Meh, I might as well document my week at camp as accurately as possible, so all of the non-campers can realize how amazing camp is.

So apparently our cabin this year was the bug cabin of Camp Kudzu. We found a dead millipede in the showers and a spider by someone's bed on the first night, there was a dead bug on my sheets, a daddy long leg on my towel, a millipede on my towel, and a demonic looking bug on one of my friend's shoulders that looked like a huge zooplankton. I'm cringing just thinking about that bug. I tried to look it up and I can't because it was just too creepy. I repeat, I am cringing over here as I type this sentence. EW. EW. EW. But I digress. Besides the bugs, stuff that happened in and outside of the cabin was pretty fun.

I learned how to play a ton of fun mind games: Snaps, the Valley of the Green Glass Door, Wombat, and This Can Has 5 Sides were the main ones I played. (Snaps is my personal favorite, and I'm going to have to see if my friends can figure out how it works.) Genevieve, one of our cabin's "cabin buddies," (The staff members of the camp that Camp Kudzu is held at that stays with our cabin during shoes off; Camp Kudzu doesn't own a campsite, but instead rents out a campsite for the three sessions of camp,) taught us all of these games.

My cabin this year! This took about 7 tries to make it kind of not blurry.

Some of my favorite activities that we did this year included tie dye, paddle boarding, and zip lining. I made one of the best tie dye shirts this year and I'm so happy with how it looks. Paddle boarding was the activity that surprised everyone in my cabin (including me) the most. We were expecting it to be really difficult and not that exciting, but it turned out to be the most fun activity we did this year. We paddle boarded around the lake, under the fountain in the lake, and we may have purposely fell in the lake a couple of times because it was a lot of fun... (Note: When I say we, I mean everyone in the cabin.) Zip lining has always been fun, so it being my favorite was not a surprise at all.

I did one of my favorite dimensions (the after dinner program for teens) again this year: boating. This year it was rather unproductive because on Monday night I stayed below 120 (120 is the minimum blood sugar to be able to participate in physical activities at camp,) the whole time; on Tuesday night, it rained and dimensions were cancelled; (Have I mentioned that it rained almost every night at camp?) and on Wednesday I was only in a boat for 20 minutes because I went low. Again. Yay for lows! Not.

On Tuesday night, we had a mini-concert where one of our counselors, which happens to be a singer that will be dropping a new album in the near future (!) sang a few of her new songs. I wasn't expecting much, but it was actually a lot of fun. After she sang and talked about living with diabetes, Justin, the guy that sings with everyone after lunch and dinner, sang in the gym and we all got to dance around and have fun in the gym. I even found Anna and we totally rocked out to the Lazy Song and probably scared a few people with how loudly we were singing.

The "official" cabin photo from this year. I'm on the farthest right on the first row.

Wednesday night was color wars and this year Anna and I were both on the blue team. I think my cabin was actually supposed to be on the red team because all of the even cabins were red and our cabin was number 12, so we should have been red. There were also more cabins on the blue team than on the red team, so that's why I'm thinking we were accidentally put on the wrong team. We were all guessing that the people in charge accidentally made cabin 13, the clinician cabin, red, so they thought the teams were even, but in reality they gave a team to a cabin of people that weren't campers. I'm not complaining, though, because the blue team won for the teen color wars and I had much more blue stuff to wear than red stuff, so it all worked out for me in the end.

I also had a lot of fun at the music party. (AKA the dance, but it isn't allowed to be called a dance because everyone thought you had to get a date to it, and people without "dates" felt bad, so the name had to be changed.) For the "music party," my sister and I decided on going as the Wonder Twins. We had matching purple shirts with the Wonder Twins' symbols on them, matching black and purple shorts, and matching knee-high socks. (Side note: dancing in knee-high socks in a gym for over an hour is not the best idea. One word sums it up: SWEAT.) One of the girls in my cabin did some magic on my hair (AKA put it in an upside down French braid) and made it look amazing. The dance was a ton of fun and it was nice to be able to talk and dance with all of my friends, especially the people that I didn't see a lot because they weren't in my cabin.

We did one of those cool converse circle pictures, except with our pumps. Guess which one is mine.

The one not-really-fun-at-all thing that happened at camp this year was the NPH incident. My blood sugar was running high around midnight, which is when the clinicians come to check everyone's blood sugars to make sure they are in safe range for sleeping. At 11 PM my blood sugar was in the high 200's and at camp you aren't allowed to give any insulin without your clinician being there, so I was told to drink some water, as usual, and wait for midnight rounds. At midnight I was 313 and had 0.3 ketones, so the clinician (which was not my usual clinician) had me cover it and go back to bed. At 1 AM the same clinician came back to check my blood sugar and ketones. I was 366, but my ketones had gone down to 0.2. Instead of waiting for the insulin to work (it had only been an hour,) the clinician made me disconnect from my pump and take a few units of NPH. Keep in mind that it is about one in the morning when all of this happened and I had no earthly clue what NPH was (apparently it's like Lantus with a shorter duration of working,) so I laid in my bed and cried a tiny bit then stayed up for what I'm assuming was 45 minutes to an hour. (My pump was off so I have no clue how long I was actually up for since I don't have any other way of keeping track of time at camp. Another side note: I didn't bring my phone to camp, as usual, and apparently this is surprising and shocking to most adults. Apparently most teenagers can't take 6 day phone breaks. Who knew?) I woke up at 284 and still detached from my pump until right before breakfast; needless to say, I was tired and annoyed that morning. That was pretty much the only annoying thing at camp.

Camp was amazing this year and I am so excited to (hopefully) be able to be a CIT at camp next year! I can't wait to be able to actually help out behind the scenes at camp and be able to help be a counselor for a cabin of little kids just like I was when I started camp.

Moral of the Story: I hope camp will be as amazing as it was this year, next year. Sans the bugs, though.