From The Past: July 12, 2004

All this week Andrew is at Student Life Youth Camp at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee. I have looked at their website and have seen that I can send him email this week which is pretty cool. I can also see daily pictures. I wonder if I’ll be able to find him in the massive crowd. Thankfully, his Nene and Pawpaw had a big suitcase for him to take. By the time we had put enough clothes in it for one week, sheets (yes, they were required too), his snacks, alarm clock, etc. I didn’t think he was going to get the thing closed! I can’t wait to see the way it all looks when it arrives back at the end of the week. I remember coming home from camp and everything stank of mildew. You just don’t have enough places to put those wet clothes and they normally don’t give you enough time to think about it either.

Surprisingly he didn’t even take a comb! He told me that he doesn’t use one so why take one. When he gets out of the shower, he uses hair gel to spike it all up on the top. Why use a comb for that when fingers will do? As long as he takes care of his braces, I really don’t care about his hair. I hope that nothing breaks while he is away. I don’t know how they would handle an emergency orthodontic situation. He has had braces since the end of the fifth grade, so he knows what he can eat and what he cannot or should not eat. Let’s hope that he uses good judgment.

I think he will have a wonderful time if he can handle being around his friends for an entire week. Andrew is really a bit of a loner. He likes his friends, but he doesn’t want to be with them all the time or he gets in a bad mood. A great example of this is that I had to take one of his friends to school every day last year. At first this didn’t bother Andrew, but by the end of the year, he hated seeing his friend every morning and refused to even talk to him. It put a strain on their relationship. I believe that it has been good for him being away from friends this summer. Maybe since he hasn’t seen them a lot he will enjoy this week thoroughly.

I know that we will miss him terribly. We rented and watched Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King last night. Since we knew that Andrew was leaving today and that he wouldn’t be back for a week, we decided to go on and watch it. We normally wait for the extended version to come out in November, but the want was too great for us and it gave us something good to do with him before he left. The movie was awesome in case you’re wondering.