Summer Camps

With our summer being so frontloaded with friends and family, the kids were finally able to do a few camps toward the end of the summer.  I didn't even start researching camps until June so of course our options were limited by then.  I presented each of the younger kids with several options and literally the only one that interested Jack was at our local pool.  It was basically games and free swim time.  It turned out to be full of younger kids so Jack didn't enjoy it as much as he thought he would, but it was nice for him to get out and have his own thing for a few days.

Luke was interested in a few things but the camp he was most adamant about attending was Wizard Boot Camp.  He had a blast!  There were games; special treats (they made their own version of Butterbeer); a close encounter experience with snakes, cockroaches, and tarantulas ("care of magical creatures"); and of course many cool magic tricks.  It was so fun to watch him perform the tricks he was learning every day!  At the end of the week each of the kids were invited to choose one trick and perform it at a final show.  Ben and Jack attended and Luke did a great job!  One of these days I'd like to make a video and have Luke perform all of his tricks but I haven't done that yet.

It was funny how the camp was heavily based on Harry Potter without actually entering
copyright territory.  For example, the kids at the camp were divided into these groups:
Twizzlerin, Huffle Cheesepuff, Griffin S'more, and Raisinclaw.
Luke was a Huffle Cheesepuff, but would have preferred Raisinclaw.

Luke had also expressed interested in starting taekwondo so I found a dirt-cheap camp at the Orem rec center so that he could try taekwondo and he loved it!

Meanwhile, Eliza had a hard time narrowing down what she wanted to do.  She chose one main camp and two shorter and much less expensive camps.  The main one was a week of rock climbing (really, bouldering) at a gym in Lehi.  She LOVED it and took to it quickly and easily.  It was fun to hear how pumped she was after each day, using new terms to tell me how she "flashed" (successfully cimbed the first time) this or that route, how she tried a "V4" climb (the V-Scale rates difficulty), and more.  When I told her on the last day that I wanted to take a few pictures and make a video, she had lots of things she wanted to show me.  A few friends from camp had hung out afterward too and I loved that they were cheering for her and helping her along.  It was also cool that Nathaniel Coleman of Murray won a silver medal for combined sport climbing in the Tokyo Olympics that week, at the sport's Olympic debut, so we could talk about that as she was learning and going to camp each day.

Eliza's second camp was a tennis camp through the Provo rec center.  She had a blast with this too and felt like she was learning quickly.

Here's Eliza on her last day ... the day she forgot to bring her racket.

The third camp was more of a volleyball workshop at UVU (Friday afternoon, then Saturday morning).  She attended with her cousin and they had fun there together.