This year we have Pioneer Trek in the summer which generally takes the place of youth conference. But I guess this ward does youth conference in the winter and our YW president really didn't want to skip youth conference. So we had it anyway. I wasn't a fan of taking a long weekend from families and doing youth conference, (more family time, less church activity time, please), but I'm a counselor so I support.
We have our Deer Valley Ski weekend over this day off of school, so we could only go to Youth Conference on Thursday. But, there were fun kids, fun activities and good food so we had a ball while we were there.
(Except that we had a girl who got sick in our car on the way up. Dan scrubbed really well, but the smell remains. It's a bummer, but Nick's thrown up in several of our friends' cars, and I think Marty did too. So we take our "turn" with compassion!)
Our neighbors are very generous in letting the youth use their cabin in Oakley, and it's not a small cabin. Most of the 60 attendees had beds to sleep on! (Sleeping bags on beds.) Oakley is only an hour away, so me and another leader went up earlier to unload food and get dinner warming in crock-pots. Then we came back home to load up the youth and take them up.
After dinner we played a version of "Fugitive" with a "professional Fugitive organizer." Everyone brought snow clothes, the youth and leaders were divided into 8 teams -- 4 "lost" teams and 4 "rescue" teams -- and the rest of the leaders were the "kill" teams sent out with paintball guns to shoot anything that moved or made noise. If we were silent and still as they walked by, they had to pretend they couldn't see us. Anyone shot had to be carried--no one left behind. The four groups were left off at various places around the cabin and then had to wait for their rescue team to bring them back to the barn (which we didn't know where that was). All in about 2 feet of snow.
Our group was left off by two flat areas which we discovered were two holding ponds. We didn't want to take the risk of crossing them (and finding out they weren't frozen) for the sake of the game. Meanwhile our rescue team, led by Chris, found us and did want us to cross and it caused some discord. Especially on the way home from the activity when it was just our family in the car and Chris was mad that our team lost and wouldn't trust him. I gave him some tips of how a leader actually leads (listening to concerns, discussing options, checking the site), rather than saying, "I'm the leader so you have to follow me."
He said I didn't know what I was talking about because I have no leadership experience and he has way more than me. I told him he is 17 and I'm 48, and I do have more experience than he does and we pretty much argued for the next 20 minutes until we got to Deer Valley.
On the bright side, I was "designated" to be injured and carried in a sled by our team. When the snow got so deep that we couldn't pull the sled well, Chris carried me on his back and was super patient with me weighing so much and not being able to jump up on his back well.
I'm pretty sure if there were ever a real emergency, my boys would definitely save me. I'm just going to have to keep my mouth glued shut (and be prepared to swim).
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