It's a sauna camp in Jersey!

So today during camp it was 87 degrees outside.... it was about 5 degrees hotter than that in the gym! I don't think I've mentioned it yet but we don't have air conditioning in our gym at the youth center this week so our poor kids leave everyday dehydrated and most are practically suffering from heat stroke. Since it was cooler outside than in, we decided to try "tie the knot" out by the playground .

I think I've mentioned once or twice though that Ryan and I tend to be slightly unlucky so naturally after only 5 minutes we received a "LIGHTNING WITHIN 5 MILES" warning and had to hurry back into our roasting gym.

Despite the blazing heat though our kiddos were awesome! Obviously the heat didn't impact their creativity! All four teams came up with absolutely solid performances for "Celebrity Suitcase!" I now have a new motto though: "When in doubt, just make a poster." I'm finding that most our campers are visual learners so when they struggle to understand a challenge we write it out for them to see. We made a Celebrity Suitcase Check List for each team to follow.

Green Team!! From left to right we have Peyton Manning, Lady Gaga, airport security, and Johnny Depp!

Blue Team!! Celebrities- Beyonce, Alicia Keys, and Janet Jackson.

Red Team! Celebrities- Lil wayne, Michael Jackson, and Justin Bieber

Purple Team! Celebrities- Selena Gomez, Hanna Montana, and Alicia Keys.

This week we've only had one major behavior problem. We've had a girl that just can't work well on a team because she has such a negative attitude. Her team wasn't getting anything done and everyone involved seemed to be extremely frustrated. She blamed everyone else for everything and nothing was ever her fault. We tried a new strategy today where we had the girl start camp by sitting out and her task was to observe what working on a team with a positive attitude looks like. At first she was really angry and told me she saw "ABSOLUTELY NO TEAMWORK" so I took her over to the target we made at the beginning of the week and gave her a piece of paper. I told her to focus specifically on teamwork traits from the target and she could only write down positive things. She eventually came up with a pretty good list and when she was done we had her sign the bottom saying that she would commit to following everything she observed on the other teams. When she was ready to join her team, she was a completely different girl than the previous days. We could tell she was really trying to be positive and her team seemed really excited to have the new "her" working with them.

Here is the "Teamwork observations" list

At the end of the day, the kids were absolutely exhausted and drenched in sweat! They persevered through the heat and worked so hard at camp!

Here's our poor dehydrated group.

Despite their exhaustion though they finished strong with big smiles!

Another picture of our champions!

After a long but fantastic day of camp our awesome POC took us out to dinner at a fun little place on base. This was the first POC to take us out and it was so much fun. Another staff member from the youth center also joined us. It was the best ending to our already solid day! We will definitely miss McGuire AFB!