Our kids have returned from camp. It has been a hard week. We dropped them off last Sunday the 14th, drove them up and dropped them off ourselves. It seemed to be going all right, even though Alex was pretty apprehensive about being gone all week, but it seemed like it was going to be a fun time. It was 4th grade camp for the both of them, even though Alex is going into 5th grade, but we wanted them both to be there for the week that our church runs the camp and Alex missed it last year. They were doing a kind of mad scientist theme, and it seemed like it was going to be fun when we dropped them off. By Tuesday though, we got a phone call from Gary that Alex was really upset and homesick, and wanted us to come get him and bring him home. We had been afraid of getting that call, but we told him to tell Alex no, we weren't going to take him home. It broke our hearts and it was all we could think about for the next couple days. (However...we had an amazing diversion Wednesday when we went over to the Purvis' house and Patrick told us about the news reporters when read on the air the "names" of the pilots of that Korean airliner that crashed last week...we watched the clip on YouTube and almost died laughing...so wrong, but lighten up) We heard from Gary a couple more times during the week to let us know how things were going. He got pretty upset when we told him no, but he rallied, which we were glad to hear, and for the rest of the week it was mostly the same: he's doing great when things are busy and he has things to do, but in the quiet or slow times he gets very homesick and wants to go home. But he made it through, and we hear that he was doing well enough that at the talent show at the end of the week he got up on stage and did a stand-up comedy routine! And really hammed it up, from what we were told. (What do you call a kingdom without a king? Dumb!) Anyway, we picked him and Missy up tonight and he's already made it plain to us that he never wants to go to camp that long again. Missy did great all week...she loved it. She wants to go back to camp next year.