Trey's exciting birthday week

Trey up and decided to stick it to his anxiety, and set off to church camp with his brave Giga and a handful of his buddies. Words cannot say how proud we are of how far this boy has come. Camp was something we never even dreamed of.

But there it was that he spent his birthday week, swimming and hiking the mountainside and sweating and tweening, as he is now way too cool for hand motions. But aside from a few moments of uncertainty each day, he had a blast.

I got to go up and see him on his actual birthday, though he was much gladder to see the cupcakes I was carrying than my face. Then Brandon went up for a night and got to bond with his birthday boy, and scare a few of the other kids. Fun times and great memories.

Trey brought home with him three camp-exclusive things. The first was shoes so smelly they should have their own zip code. Good grief, boys and their feet. Nasty, nasty, nasty.

The second was playing card fascination. He has taught me games I never knew about, and in turn I have showered him with games that I learned at my camps so long ago. Definitely our favorite thing to do together right now, and how marvelous to laugh and grin and sometimes cheat and shout over that one card someone needed being the last one in the deck.

And the third is this:

It's an earworm for the ages, because he practices all. the. time. Aden tries to do it, arms flying everywhere, a missed beat, then a cup flying across the room in anger. I try to do it but can't seem to memorize what hand goes where toward the end. But Trey, he's good at it.

We're glad to have Trey home, having missed him so much on his tenth birthday. We spaced out our gifts to him, which seemed to quell the gift-jonesing for a while anyway.

The family came on Sunday to eat and hang together and hand over the long-awaited presents. After we all listened so intently to the many priceless camp stories over a yummy dinner, the boy racked up on books and games.