And They Lived Happily Ever After... THE END : Summit Semester Week 12

The end to a season has come... check out what went down on the final week of this grand Colorado adventure.

What happened this week:

     Sunday was our last day at the church in town. It was bittersweet. At the end of the service, they had church members pray over us, which was so sweet. After church, I spent the afternoon downtown. I went out to eat with Khyri and spent some time in a coffee shop using internet (typical white girl, am I right?). We went back to the lodge to have dinner, which was leftovers. Our last night of leftovers! After dinner, we had our last family meeting, which was also our last family meeting (this week is full of lasts....so bittersweet). Halfway through the meeting, my family comes up the stairs! I burst into tears and embraced them in the longest hugs. After family meeting (it was hard to focus after that), I introduced a majority of the students to my brothers and mom, and then went and helped my family settle into their living quarters. I spent about two hours down there, helping them unpack and telling them stories and hearing stories from back home and laughing. I remembered how much I missed them and I was overjoyed to have them back with me. After a while, I took the two elder brothers (not the baby) up to go dancing, and afterwards we played pool with Madison. I know I had a good time with my brothers, bonding and seeing them again after three months, and I hope they had a good time interacting with my Summit family and doing some fun stuff. I went to bed almost immediately after they did though, I was exhausted! Long, joyful day.

     Monday was crazy busy, but oh so good. I woke up earlier than normal to go hang out with my family before continental breakfast. Only my mom and baby bro went up to breakfast with me, but it was still some good bonding time. We had a lot of debriefing classes in the morning, about how to talk about your experience when you return and what college might look like after attending Semester. I had the assumption that my family would return again (they left to get the second half of my family during classes to return for lunch), but they didn't for a while. They were a little late to lunch, but all is good. I had dish pit after lunch, and even after that, my small group had a mini photoshoot session on the property. We took some pretty fun photos and had a great time. My family had gone into town, and my small group went into town to get matching coffee mugs, but came out with matching Colorado socks instead. I met up with my family and left my small group for a later time. We hung out at the middle school playground and felt the natural hot springs together and all returned to the lodge for dinner. After dinner, there was a skiing meeting, and I then realized that my brothers were skiing and had zero ski gear, so I ran around the lodge looking for peers that weren't skiing and had extra clothing that was available for borrowing. We had success. I had more debriefing classes in the evening, to which my brothers and dad hung around for (pretty sweeeet), and they seemed to enjoy the talk about God's will. They went to their living space with my mom and I went to small groups. Our last one! We wrote letters to our future selves and ate fun foods and had a compliment circle and prayed over one another. It was a great end to a great small group. We also talked about staying in touch and visiting one another, to which I was very on board with. Small groups ended in tears, like it has every week for the past eleven weeks, and I headed for bed. What a day!

     Tuesday was ski day! It was absolutely incredible. My family went with our Summit group to the ski lodge, which made it even better. My summit friends met my biological friends (aka brothers) and we had fun bonding times falling in the snow wearing metal sticks. I spent the majority of the time with the two older aged brothers (the four year old did not want to be in the snow) and we had a blast. I didn't realize how much I missed them until Tuesday, when we got to hang out like the best friends we've grown up being. We stayed on the beginner slopes all day, which was really good because none of us had ever skied before. As a trio, we only had two major wipe outs, one almost running into a brother and a tree, and one running into a few orange safety signs, knocking down some plastic poles in the process (oops). My family left a little early to have some family bonding time without me (it's cool – I had previous commitments), and only fifteen minutes after they left and I went inside, my skis were apparently picked up by someone that wasn't me, and they went missing. I spent the next thirty minutes trying to find them, resulting in nothing but frustration. I never found them before we left, so I went to the ski rentals and reported my missing skis. Who knows if they ever found them! I was so tired by the skiing, that I slept the whole ride home (1 hour) and was ready to bed. But our schedule suggested something else: dinner (Dustin, head of Semester, made soup for us! So good!), class (about how to scout out a church), cooking (orange jello salad and sourdough bread for Thanksgiving), and a movie (Inside Out was the movie – SO GOOD). I did them all, but I was beyond exhausted through it all. You know how sometimes exhaustion can cause you to be a little more emotional that normal? That was me all evening. I'll have to apologize to my Summit friends in the morning for my excessive crying. It was a very long and physically (and emotional... Inside Out y'all) exhausting day, but it was still so good. But I was also very thrilled to hit the hay at the end of it!

     Wednesday morning started out pretty great. We went out into the woods around the property and cut down a beautiful Christmas tree for the lodge! We came back and decorated it, along with the rest of the dining hall. It was a very festive morning. After lunch, the rest of my family went back to their room to clean (minus my dad who helped in the kitchen a bit), while I had my final work crews. We deep cleaned the guest bedrooms and the dining hall to prepare for the large amount of guests coming for Thanksgiving and graduation. It was a bittersweet time, but a good time. After dinner, which was delicious (as always), we had our Secret Sister reveal. It was so much fun. There were so many squeals and hugs shared amongst us girls, and my secret sister completely caught me by surprise cuz I had no clue who she was! It was a fun time. We also had a “cleaning party” that night, which included deep cleaning our bathrooms to our mentor's satisfaction. After cleaning and jamming to some sweet sounds, I went to the dining hall to make sourdough for Thanksgiving and played some board games with my family. I walked my baby brother and mom back to their room and ended up falling asleep with my brother by the fire, before I was eventually sent back to my room to go to bed. What a day!

     Thursday was THANKSGIVING! I hoped to sleep in a bit, but my brain is a creature of habit and had me wake up exactly when I always do. I got dressed and headed down to my family's room to hang out with them that morning. We said what we were thankful for, looked through my brother's pictures, I wrote my graduation speech, and we just relaxed before lunch at two. Lunch was sooo good! About twenty side dishes to choose from and seventeen desserts. I was absolutely stuffed by the end of the meal. My brothers and mother and I took the time after lunch to go scout out a “Charlie Brown Christmas tree” and successfully found one. We chopped it down and put it in our van to take home this year. Who doesn't want a Charlie Brown Christmas tree from Colorado in their living room? We went back to the dining hall to play more board games, ate a little dinner, and while my parents went to a meeting with Dustin, my brothers and I hung out with the rest of the students and siblings in the dining hall. We eventually couldn't handle it and went over to the girls' lodge right as the parent meeting was ending, in order to have our movie night! We watched It's a Wonderful Life, and there were only about fifteen of us, which is a third of what our normal movie nights consist of (half being my family itself). It was odd not having a lot of people, but it was still enjoyable and we had some great discussion afterwards. Not necessarily serious discussion, but rather silly comments and questions that arose, making us all laugh hard. It was a wonderful end to a wonderful day.

     Friday was GRADUATION! I woke up to Micaela coming in crying and hugging me, not ready to leave. That made Friday very real and emotional. I got many visits from her throughout the day, and I realized that that is something she's known for doing in the girl dorms and that would be the last time she'd ever get to do so. I started packing up that morning, and got a big chunk of it taken care of, but I got depressed about leaving and stopped. I went down to see my family, and started crying when talking to them about leaving. My mom came up to my room and helped me finish packing, to which I was grateful. I worked on my graduation speech and soaked in my last hours with this community, which included a spontaneous trip to the dumpsters at the end of the road with Micaela, Anna, Em, and Lauren. After that fun adventure with Terry, the maintenance guy, we thanked him and went back to the girl's lodge to get ready for the evening. Madi and I got ready in our room, with several of the girls coming in and out for fashion advice or wanting to hang out with us to get ready (I wasn't complaining). About an hour before dinner was to start, my family showed up and my mom helped me with my last minute things. We waited for it to be time to go eat and graduate, and while we were, I ended up helping one of my classmate's, Katie, and her family get a photo together. It was quite enjoyable and time flew by when I was waiting. The graduation dinner and ceremony was so lovely. The dinner was so fancy and I got to sit by my roomie and one of my Texas classmates. We had steak and chocolate mousse – it was delicious! After dinner, they went around the room and gave the students the opportunity to read their speeches. The majority of them made me cry. I was so impressed by what they all had to say and what they had learned and the sweet words filled by heart. Dustin also gave a really sweet farewell speech, which of course made me cry also. We also had a diploma ceremony, which was followed by a long train of all the sweet mentors with hugs and sweet words (that also made me cry). The next hour or so was spent taking hundreds of photos with pretty much every single staff or student. Down in the girl's dorm was lots of dancing, to which my family eventually made it's way there. It was our last time to enjoy the dancing, so I tried soaking it all in. We danced until we couldn't anymore (and by that, we mean the music was shut off against our will). An all-nighter was suggested and planned for the rest of the evening, and I tried keeping up, but I couldn't. We ate oreos and played the card game of spoons, and my brothers went to bed while I attempted to stay awake. When I started falling asleep in the Christmas sleigh at 3am, I was told to go to bed.

     Saturday, my family and I started back home, ending (officially) my Summit Semester experience and heading back to the frigid South Texas (that's sarcasm... it's in the 70s back home). It started at 6:30am when Micaela came to wake me up and say that she was leaving. It was a good thing that I was partially asleep when she came in, otherwise I would've cried my heart out (she's been my best buddy since being at Summit). I headed back to the main lodge at 7:30 to say my goodbyes. It was a rough morning. Everyone was just sitting around until it was time for people to leave, then tears started flowing again. That lasted several hours, every thirty minutes another person or two would leave. Finally, there was an hour of time before anyone would leave, so I ran down to finish cleaning up my room, stopping to give hugs and say goodbye to people in between. I had a hard time. There was a time eventually that I just sat in Brittany's room while she cleaned because I didn't want to be alone or think about sad things. She offered me chocolate while she vacuumed. She and I were the last to leave. I got my last things from the kitchen and gave my hugs to the staff. Brittany and I gave our final hugs, not wanting to say goodbye. The entire drive out of the property (about a ten minute drive), I was bawling. I eventually went to sleep because I was exhausted and I had been crying my eyes out so long. I felt bad for my family having to deal with my emotional state. We made it to Las Vegas (New Mexico) for dinner and made it to our hotel. We fell asleep pretty quickly afterwards because we were exhausted.

      Sunday involved going to the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. It was pretty fun! We sled down the sand dunes for several hours, getting sand in our shoes, socks, pants pockets, and even our mouths (that was my bad... I fell down in the process of coming down a sand dune). We spent the whole morning in our hotel room, relaxing. But the rest of our afternoon was spent in the White Sands, which ended in watching the prettiest pink sunset as we were leaving the dunes (my thoughts went out to my sweet Anna from Summit cuz pink skies are her fav). We went to Walmart on the way back to our hotel to get dinner – everyone picked out their own meal and we went back to our hotel to consume them. We watched the Miss Universe contest while eating our tv dinners. My parents went to bed and we watched videos that we had made that day, as well as watching the new Beauty and the Beast movie. Us kids finally went to sleep around 2am.

Thanks for following along with me as I do life!

Blessings,

Becca

Ready to ski!

Fun in the leaves on Thanksgiving

Graduation day!

I did it! I graduated!!

Attempting to take a group/family photo on graduation night.

Sledding down the White Sands in New Mexico!