Youth Conference 2019

Our ward went to Youth Conference at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah this year.  Alison had a job babysitting two or three days per week, so she was unable to attend, but Nicole went.

Ha ha!  She looks super uncomfortable in this picture. Back L-R: Olivia, Jade, Cassie Front L-R:Sis. Mertens, Nic, Breanna.

There were so many fun pictures taken by our amazing youth leaders.  I tried to only grab a few.

This looks liek a crazy game.  She's with Karlton, Jackson, and Cassie here.

This is the first of many pictures taken at the water games.

Batter up!!!

Crab soccer.

That's Nicole on the right slip-n-slide.

She makes it look easy, staring at the camera and posing!  But I can tell you from looking at all the other photos of the other kids that this was not easy!

She's so cool!  I wonder if she could slip-n-slide for a talent show some time!!!

More water games.

She's chasing Jade around the circle in some sort of duck duck goose game with a wet sponge.

One evening, they went to the Manti pagent. L-R: Breanna, Cassie, Jade, Olivia, Nicole

This was the very last year that the Manti pagent was playing.  I am glad she got to see it before it ended.

Here's a sad story.  They spent the entire day at this ropes course camp.  One of the first things they did was a kind of hard, scary looking one.  You had to jump off a platform and try to touch something dangling in the air.  None of the girls dared to do it EXCEPT Nicky.  Because she's awesome.

So she went up with the young men of our ward.  When it was her turn, something went wrong.  She swung her arms behind her to get some momentum for the jump and somehow the rope wrapped itself around her arm.  As she jumped, it tightened.  Miraculously, Nicole felt it and yanked her arm out.  She was told that if she hadn't done that, things could have been much worse!  As is was, she had a terrible rope burn all up her arm (both on her forearm and under the top of her arm, near the armpit).  It was pretty nasty.  So, poor Nicole spent most of the coolest day - the one she would have loved the most - in the medical tent.

Here she is just chillin.  Wishing she could crawl into a hole somewhere so that people would stop checking up on her and telling her how tough she is, etc.  That made for an interesting experience, but she'll always have the scars so she'll look pretty cool.