Syd Rich: I Have Never Felt Old Until

I went to Girl's Camp with the Eastmark stake. In my head, no matter how old or young someone is, I automatically assume that I am either 2 years older or 2 years younger than someone (unless physically obvious otherwise). Well last week I had the opportunity to help my mom (the young women's president in her ward) at girl's camp due to a shortage of leader representation from the ward. I got along very easily with all the girls, as if I wasn't a leader, but one of them... that is until they told me what year they were born in... A majority of the girls at girl's camp were born in the 2000s. I know that shouldn't be such an earth shattering thing, but it was for me. In my head everyone is born in the 90s unless they are older than me, and yet here I was laughing with girls who would be graduating high school 6 or 7 years after me. That's just too insane of a thought to me, I still think I'm 16 sitting in AP US History half the time. So this is it people, I do now actually feel old. Welcome to adulthood, Sydney.

Besides the enlightenment of my age I loved being at Girl's Camp. It had been three years since the last time I went, and I was so excited for the overwhelming spiritual nourishment. During my years at girl's camp we always went up north to Camp Lomia, but this year got switched up and we went down south to Camp Zion on Mt Lemmon (which by the way is where the big YSA activity for Tucson is every year, so I was familiar with the area). The biggest difference between Lomia and Zion was that Lomia has cabins and addys, while Zion used tents. I knew that was not an exciting thought for most of the girls (and admittantly me, that is until I found out I could sleep on a cot), so I really tried to make sure everyone was staying positive. I knew that if one girl had a bad attitude about it, then it would just snow ball to the rest of the girls. I'm pretty sure the girls were sick of me by the end of the week (maybe even the first day) because of how much I said the word "positive", but hey it worked, the girls stayed positive the entire camp.

I am so happy that I had this opportunity to serve the ladies of the Eastridge ward, I developed lots of new instagram followers which I will be eternally grateful for. And most of the girls instagrammed the sweet pictures I took of them over the week, so I feel pretty famous.

#leadersrule

This uno game did cause a little bit of contention when girls had conflicting rules

Some of my favorite memories were when Jessica (not pictured) gave dance lessons to all the girls

See they're even positive when they're partaking in service

One of the young women in my mom's ward, Kayla Ison, painted this! I was in awe

We had to get creative when it came to entertainment, including tic tac toe out of charcoal

Skit night was clearly a blast

One of the priesthood gave an amazing devotional about the stars and tying it to the Plan of Salvation. I stayed with some girls after the devotional was over to star gaze for a while. I really wanted to take a picture of how magnificent the stars looked, but I didn't bring my camera with me that night. I tried to go out every other night to do it, but there was always cloud cover. So unfortunately, no star pictures, but I did catch this beauty of the sky and Tucson catching on fire.