Well camp came to an end and I'm back at home with my girls again. It seemed like forever away from my wife and daughter but I must say that this years camp session went infinitely better than last year. I guess since I didn't get to tell a lot when I blogged at camp I'll back track a little.
We left very late on Saturday night. We stopped in Abilene on the way to our stopping place that night for dinner and met up with Michelle's parents and Jen and Benton. This was the first time that I got to see him which was pretty exciting. I took this picture of Clara and her cousin. She seemed very excited to see him.

When we finally got to camp I ended up having a much better time than last year. The staff there this year was much better and I really enjoyed my time there. I got to meet some new people and had some good conversations with other youth ministers. I also hung out quite a bit with a couple of students from LCU who were there to help teach. They were pretty funny guys and one of the days we had some free time so the three of us went on a hike together up one of the mountains that overlooked the camp. Here's one of the pictures overlooking the camp from the top of the mountain.

We hiked up to the top of this mountain, which was much more than I bargained for, but it was a blast. Just the break away from the stresses of camp that I needed. Somehow we reverted back to childhood while we were up there. We spent the whole time trying to push over dead trees (sounds dumb but trust me it was fun) and roll rocks all the way down the mountain (again, sounds dumb but really fun). One of the guys took some videos of us knocking over these dead trees and they are pretty funny. If he ever posts them on youtube then I'll link them on here so you can see just how funny we though we were.

I came home and thought that I would be able to relax a bit now that camp was over, but boy was I dead wrong. I took the day off Monday, and then spent the whole day trying to get our Internet fixed (down with AT&T!), trying to get my license un-revoked (long story, which I'll get into another time), and mowing my ridiculously large lawn. So all that to say that it's good to be home with my wife and baby Clarabell. Please keep the Percival family in your prayers. Things have been pretty rough on the home front. I don't want to sound too negative by posting the reasons why on my blog, so some simple prayers for the Percival's will do fine.

If you haven't already checked out the slide show on Tammy Marcelain's blog of Benton Blayne please do. There are some great pictures on there of my nephew, and if you like Clara pictures, there are a few of those too.

Before I write anything I feel as though I must apologize to my two readers. I know that there are few who check my blog ever, and now that I've waited so long to post I'm sure I've lost even those two. Since my last post life has got the best of me. There have been many struggles in my life and it seems like there is just never a free moment to post on this blog. All my free moments I try to spend watching my beautiful little girl grow before my eyes. I have a really good video on my phone of her playing peek-a-boo with me, but that will have to wait for another post because I'm at Bible camp without my memory card converter.
This week is Pine Springs Summer Camp with the youth group. We have absolutely no cell phone reception out here but the camp does have internet connection so I can get on and post and email every now and then. I've really enjoyed camp this year as compared to last year. I won't even get started as to the reasons why, but it's been such a breath of fresh air given the expectations I had coming into this week. However, it still is a lonely week here without my wife and daughter. I absolutely hate missing any time with Clarabell at this point in her life. She's learning so much, so fast, I'm afraid I'm going to miss something.
I brought a camera to camp this year with the intention of being better about using it. It seems like every youth trip I wish that I had more pictures when all is said and done. But I'm terrible at taking pictures so I came up with the bright idea to give the camera to one of my teens and let them take it around and take some pictures. The only problem is that our camera ran out of battery on the way out to camp. I tried to plug it in to the charger that I brought, but no luck whatsoever. So the following pictures were taken before we got to camp in Artesia, NM. There's these really strange iron statues at random places throughout the small town.