efy: year two. week five.

Lots of pictures this week.

I looooove Santa Barbara! Why did I have to leave?

efy on the ocean all week long = heaven?

So I was there for two weeks. During the weekend in between efy sessions I just slept and relaxed. We all went to the beach and swam. I got splashed by a freezing wave thus capturing the following hilarious picture.

One of the counselors was a Santa Barbara local so he invited us all over for a bbq and then we went to a movie afterwards. But look at that view above. That's from the balcony of his house. Amazing.

Check-in!

Ok ok I know I say every week is amazing and incredible and awesome...but this week REALLY was! I promise. (ok I know I say that too...but really!..)

What made this week awesome was

1) the spirit.

2) the location.

3) my coco.

4) the kids, particularly the boys.

5) the three nephites

Ok not the reeeeal three nephites. But the 3 boys who I called the three nephites:

Blake, Jimmy, and Kyle (the non-member).

It's boys like this that make it fun for everyone else. They're not normal. They included everyone and made sure everyone was involved in everything. They were like efy celebrities this week. Picture taking on Friday was a nightmare as we had girls from other groups literally lining up to take pictures with them. We were an hour late to the dance because of this!

They had "theme" days for clothes throughout the whole week where they dressed similar.

Tuesday was "Plaid Tuesday" but I didn't get a picture of that.

Euro-Wednesday.

Dapper Thursday.

Polka-Dot Friday.

And somehow they got into the Variety Show with this funny random performance:

They even got the entire group to commit to being the last company to leave the cafeteria after every single meal so they could do a clean sweep of the building and clean it up. Again, these are teenagers. So sometimes they would be sitting there for 45 minutes after eating waiting for everyone to leave...which means I had to also. But I enjoyed it and they all ended up teaching me much about service.

But it wasn't just the three nephites who made it a great week. Every teenager was just involved and broke out of their comfort zones and got along with each other.

And our flag won first place.

In honor of the 4th of July I wore floaties and an intertube to games night. Hey anything goes!

I'm so proud of the above photo. I mean really? This kid is a monster! Too bad I had to tell him to stop doing this at efy...but of course not until I got this awesome photo.

The session director came to one of my nightly devotionals. It was awesome.

And the above picture is called: Let's Find The Counselor!

K people, check the ocean in the background above. That's how close we were all week long. The building to the left is the cafeteria.

That is a ton of yellow.

There were so many good experiences from this week that it would take forever to write them down. One girl came as an atheist and left with a testimony. One boy came having no friends at home and left with many. It was all awesome.

They begged and begged me to make a slideshow for this past week and so I did.

You don't have to watch it because it's 12 minutes long.

But I'm putting it here so I won't lose it or forget about it.

Here it is!: