Cousins Camp

Following the family reunion, Josh' sister Jessica, and her husband Dave, organized 'cousins camp'. They had a a very tight schedule, and when I first saw it a few months ago, I closed the program quickly thinking 'oh no, not even more to add to my 'to-do-list'. As I knew everyone put their best effort into making this successful, I tried my best for my very small assignments. Well, I am ready to have cousins camp at our house next year. Wow! I have never seen anything more special for a family, what a way to develop thiose family relationships, to leave a legacy of the Jewkes and Heninger family, to create a sense of pride in the kids to be related to the parents of mom and dad, and to strengthen the will of all the kids to be the best they can be, so they can be an eternal family with their cousins and ancestors.

There were delicious breakfasts, lunches and dinners; exciting and innovative crafts and snacks, like making T-shirts, icecream in a ziplock bag, creating and blasting off rockets, creating beautiful personal journals (and encouragement to write i them), fun and creative treasure hunts, exciting and a huge variety of exciting games, races, relays, soccer games, water balloon games....... and many many more activities, particularly swimming. And best of all, there were many mini-devotionals, where the children heard special spiritually uplifting stories from mom/dad or their parents on values and principles that the Jewkes stand for: obedience, listening to the Spirit, importance of family and children, service..... My girls still remember many of the stories and the good feelings they felt, and the excitement of trying to be better. Finally, I absolutely loved how each child got some recognition for some special trait they showed during the day, and that they were reminded of how that trait resembled what one of the great-grandparents stood for. Each child would receive a button woith a picture of one of those great grandparents whom they had tried to emulate that day, which each one wore with pride!!!  Dave adn Jessica, I can not even begin to express the gratitude I felt for the two of you to put this program up. 1000,000x thank you.

Pictures to come