Wednesday of Ooey Gooey Week
A birthday surprise!
This week at CYC has been special for a number of reasons. First of all it’s ooey gooey week — a camper and counselor favorite! Secondly there have been several surprise activities (see Sunday’s blog for a description of one such activity that ended in Natalie being turned into a giant human sundae!). But one more reason why this week has been special is that we’ve had two — not one but two! — birthdays to celebrate.
Yesterday and today before breakfast the Birthday Crew marched into the dining hall wearing their full Birthday Crew regalia. As the special birthday song played over the speakers the Crew surrounded the tables of the birthday girls. After our birthday announcements (which were both met with clapping and cheering by the other campers) we sang our CYC birthday song and presented their birthday girls with sashes and a set of birthday privileges. Included in these privileges are the right to go first in line at all meals the right to go first in line at the camp store and one free ice cream treat from the camp store.
All day today (and yesterday) campers have been going up and wishing these two birthday girls a happy birthday. I’ve even heard some extra birthday singing around camp…
Cabin activities…
This morning after breakfast and holy ground cabins headed out to do activities together. Each week in addition to the individual activities that campers get to select cabins choose a few activities to do together. This helps with cabin bonding and it also gives everyone as many chances to try new things as they can possibly have.
Just as I walked around camp during this time I heard cabins working as a team to get their canoes into the water others shouting and cheering as they jumped off our floating dock into the lake and I saw a few others down at the tomahawk range doing their best to score a bullseye.
An ooey gooey identification challenge!
After these cabin activities counselors led their cabins down to the Friendship Circle (this is what we call our campfire circle) for an Ooey Gooey Identification Challenge.
After an opening skit — a skit in which we found out that Dr. Ooze creator of the worlds first "substance creation station" had created just one button that would mix up all of the gooey materials he had created and in which Dr. Know-it-all Dr. Ooze’s assistant accidentally pressed this button — campers were given sheets of paper with fifteen spaces and told to visit each of the fifteen stations (manned by counselors and LITs). At each station each camper got a chance to feel a mysterious substance and write down a guess about what they thought it might be.
Here’s a picture of the station itself (with Program Director Shayla standing in the background).
After campers had a chance to guess at each of the stations the substances were revealed one by one. The only unfortunate part of the whole activity was that Co-Program Director Paul had to eat a mixture of all of the substances that campers correctly identified (things like jello syrup Co-co Puffs and pudding). He was a good sport about it though and campers cheered him on all the while.
Right now campers are out finishing the game of Angels and Demons that the rain interrupted on Monday night. After that they will head up to lunch and then to an afternoon full of activities.
Little do they know however that we have many more even gooier challenges awaiting them later in the week!