This weekend was spent camping at a Christian Karate camp that my 3 oldest children were attending. I’ve not had a lot of time and energy to spend crafting a new blog post, but I thought I’d share some little tidbits of our weekend.
We brought our pop up along while most of the other “campers” were tent camping. On Saturday morning, we were impressed to see somewhere between 30 and 40 tents all sprawled out around the camp area. We had to stay separate from them since it was a “tents only” area. I had planned to get a picture of them all set up together this morning, but by the time I made it up there with my camera, they were taking them down.
On Saturday, they spent a good part of the day training. They also were able to swim and hike. Part of the time, they were in uniform, part of the time, they were in shorts and t-shirts.
Our 14 year old son was one of the higher belt ranks at the camp (he’s a red belt with 2 blue tips, which is one rank from black belt), so he took part in some of the demonstrations. He’s the one in the blue shirt, looking all serious….
As for the Karate Camp, there were 3 things that I was totally impressed with.
1. They encourage parents to be at camp with their kids.
2. They use the opportunity of having a camp to encourage the children in Scripture. The theme of the weekend was Putting on the Full Armour of God.
3. They really focused on helping them to improve their Karate skills all while having some fun, too! The perfect combo!
While the older kids were all busy at camp, we came and went as we pleased with the 3 younger children. We discovered that it was a little bit harder than normal to entertain them. We couldn’t figure out why and then realized it had to be because they’re so used to having older kids around who are always doing silly things and readily willing and available to keep the littler ones busy.
Our expectations were that the younger kids could join some of the camp kids in water activities on one of the days, but that didn’t work out as we had planned. Alternatively, we decided to take them back to our camp and let them play in the water with some of the toys we had.
Here’s our version of a redneck swimming pool! 🙂 Yes, the trash can was clean! My husband had just bought it that day.
It’s like an old fashioned bathtub! Notice the baby doll in the pot on the far left…..she does everything they do! They had so much fun swimming in pots and trash cans that they want to do it again soon!
While the little girls were playing in the water, we were trying to keep our little man from eating all of the rocks, dirt and acorns he could find. If only he’d found the dog food, he would’ve thought he was in heaven! Unfortunately, he doesn’t like playing in the water. We did end up scrubbing him down while standing in one of the pots of clean water, just to get some of the camping filth off of him. He, of course, screamed the whole time!
That about wraps up our weekend!
What about you? How was your weekend? Did you do anything exciting?
Diane Hurst says
I like your swimming pool idea! We have used a rubbermaid horse watering trough (brand new– we don't have horses) as a "hot tub." It is deeper than a bathtub and can be filled with really hot water. But most of the time we just use it to play/keep cool in.
Sidetracked Sarah says
That's a great idea Diane! 🙂 I've seen people use them as pools before. We didn't have many options since we were at a camp site.