Camping in Style

by Stephanie Black

Yeah, I know, I missed blogging last week. I was at girls camp.

The fact that I was at girls camp may come as a surprise to those of you who are relatively new to the blog and thus have been introduced to me through multiple posts from my beloved fellow froggie bloggers portraying me as extremely elderly, to the point that people are starting to think I walked across the plains with the pioneers. “How can such an ancient lady handle girls camp?” you are now asking yourself. “How did her orthopedic shoes do on the hike? And how the heck do you rapel down that rock with a cane anyway?” I would like to report that despite my advanced years, I survived, though maybe things will be more difficult when I hit my fortieth birthday.

This blog ageism all started when I blogged about having a daughter heading to college and the oldness thereof, and then Rob “interviewed” me like I was his great-great-grandmother and it went from there. It is true that I’m older that Rob (our designated Frog Blog Young Punk), but for the record—because no lady likes being regarded as older than she is, or Oil of Olay would go out of business—I'm about eight years older than Rob. Surprised? So is Rob, who thought I went to elementary school with Joan of Arc.

Anyway, girls camp. Our stake does girls camp on an incredible scale, and one of the things they do very well—among many things—is the food. Yum. They have a group of Cookies who sacrifice a week at home to come up to camp and cook delicious meals for approximately 160 campers/leaders. I particularly love the breakfasts. At home, my usual breakfast is a bowl of cereal. At camp we feasted on French toast and bacon, pancakes and sausage, homemade cinnamon rolls, banana bread made from scratch, crumb cake, scrambled eggs, hashbrowns, fresh fruit . . . mmm, breakfast. My husband spent a couple of days at scout camp and reported on things like gelatinous oatmeal and partially frozen milk, which made me appreciate girls camp food all the more. They're eating goop, and we’re eating ham, fajitas, lemon pasta salad with pine nuts, chocolate layered dessert . . . strangely enough, I didn’t lose any weight at camp, despite that brutal hike down to Waterfront that I made multiple times.

Camp lasts from Saturday morning to the following Friday afternoon. In previous years, a big issue for me has been “what am I going to do with my kids all week?” I’d have to farm them out to various kind friends who were willing to watch them while my husband was at work. But this year, my eighteen-year-old daughter was the Mom-in-Charge, so the kids were able to stay at home. My poor daughter. By the time I got home, she was ready to kill everyone, though, being possessed of at least a moderate amount of self-control, I’m thinking she would have limited herself to some of her best take-down moves.

Now, if I could just figure out how to get the Cookies to move in and cook breakfast for me every day . . .

In other news, Methods of Madness is now available for pre-order from Deseret Book. If you prefer audio books, an unabridged audio book is available as well. Official release date is August 1st.