To be 14 again... oh wait... ha!

This summer I have the great opportunity of working with Especially For Youth (EFY) for 8 weeks! I was a counselor last summer at U of U and had a blast! This summer I am a building counselor (BC - basically the counselors' counselor and organize the events throughout the week) which is just as great, if not better. I had a bit of a hard time my first week knowing that I wasn't going to have my own group of youth to teach, love, and just be silly with. But then I realized as a BC I have the opportunity of teaching, loving, and just being silly with ALL the youth and it gives me more of a challenge to really find someone, or a few, that I can make a personal difference in their lives. It has been so awesome!

Our team!
(Bethany, me, Katie, Tiffany, David, Ryan, and Christian)

The BC team I will be working with this summer is AMAZING! We had our first week in Montpelier, Idaho and as all 7 of us piled into a mini van with our stuff and the equipment for the week, I knew it was going to either make or break the summer... It was soooo fun! We instantly bonded and it has been nothing short of great since. That first week we had such a high caliber of youth and counselors that even with the bumps we faced we couldn't have asked for a better week. We were all afraid that it would be the favorite week of the summer already, haha! That's too soon to say but it really was just great. The last night we hiked to the M to get a view of the 30 lights in the town... it was memorable. Mont P for life!!!



It's a good thing we all get along or else this could have been disasterous!

The girls on the "M"

We stopped in Bear Lake to get the famous raspberry shakes and just had to take a few jumping pictures.

Our team with the session director at
Montpelier, Brother Stuart.
This is our favorite dance move... :)

We just finished our first week of 3 at the Sandy Institute. We had a few more issues to face than Montpelier, but we pulled together, worked as a team, and made it through no sweat. Originally we had 30 counselors with 23 being girls so we were in DIRE need of guys! We had a couple come to our rescue and we are ever so grateful for them! It was really neat to hear some of the stories that progressed through the week and saw that these counselors were there for a reason. I love it more and more.

Some of our crazy counselors during what we like to call
"EFC" (Especially for Counselors).
This occurs after 9:30 when the kids are home and we can be our own age again.

It is quite exhausting at times but you get this energy out of nowhere right when you need it and can make it through day by day. We start our second week at the Sandy Institute tomorrow night with a whole new group of counselors and then plow right into the next week. I can't wait!!!